


Smash the Mirror, Break The Palm Reader's Hand

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Contracts, Djinni & Genies, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fame, Los Angeles, M/M, Magical Realism, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Publicity, Record contracts can be abusive, Street Rats, Urban Fantasy, aladdin - Freeform, fairy tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-01-27 06:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12575756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Patrick is a pop star, arrogant and young, who believes everything he reads about himself. Pete, homeless prince of Los Angeles likes to think of himself as an opportunist... and Patrick is too good an opportunity to pass up.





	1. Chains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [therellbepeacewhenyouaredone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/therellbepeacewhenyouaredone/gifts).



> **EDIT** I have an annual Halloween curse that targets my Halloween fic every year? This posted with only 70 words originally. HERE ARE THE OTHER 4,000. Jeez.
> 
> This was written as part of the [Fic Against Fascism](http://ficagainstfascism.wordpress.com) charity drive! Thank you so much to J.M. for giving me an excuse to play with a super fun fairy tale form. 
> 
> Basically this entire fic can be summarized by the Timbaland/FOB song One & Only. There's a mini-playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/56PHBMavDmVrg0Rwrv3Dtt) if you want tunes!
> 
>  
> 
> **Happy Halloween!**

_Chains._

_One thousand years in chains._

_Caught, kept, trapped, stuffed in the belly of a lamp, cramped. The pain of bondage, the agony of indenture, the suffocating solitude balanced by the claustrophobic cacophony of shallow, short-sighted, self-serving human demands._

_Fuck mortals and fuck immortality. I want to be invisible again._

_Need freedom to live, need space to die. All-powerful but so powerless._

_One thousand gasping, grinding, garroting years in chains._

*

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived at the bottom of the L.A. River. Do you know it? It winds serpentine through overlooked parts of the city, the rattling elevated subway tracks, the barbed-wire fences, the parking lots, the industrial emptinesses. Like the concrete belly of a snake it coils, or perhaps just her skin, as there is nothing within. The river is not: it is an arroyo, a structure made deliberately hollow. A trench dug for flash floods and paved over, immaculate white and cross-hatched with drains. It bleaches and bakes in the sun, drier than the boy’s bones, empty of marrow. SoCal, that queen of deserts, is crowned in wildfire, attended by drought, dry and cracked and heaving in the heat. Her rivers run empty.

Our boy builds his tent at the bottom of this river (named but nonexistent, one of many consensual L.A. fictions). He stores his worldly possessions there, in the path of potential peril: scavenges, scraps, and trinkets. He lives knowing one swift rainstorm will sweep it all away in seconds—knowing that without warning, one indiscriminate instant can devour everything he has—knowing life is like that. A rushing wall of water, clamoring like the current, and then nothing: if he is sleeping soundly when the rains come, likely they will take him too.

Life is like that.

The boy’s name is Pete.

Pete is not a cynic, not really. He’s an opportunist. He grew up by himself on the streets of Los Angeles and he’s not overburdened by qualms about doing what is necessary to survive. Resilience, charm, and all the luck he can carry: these are his tools. He steals what he can. He eats when there’s food. He’s cunning, coy, and always has one eye on his next con.

Once upon a time, it’s a hot day in late September and Pete’s passing time on the subway platform in Hollywood, underground and out of the sun. Two kids he knows—runaways from Vegas he didn’t think would last a week—are busking, waiflike Ryan on the guitar and Brendon singing. Brendon takes up a lot of space when he sings; a crowd can’t help but gather. They have a battered top hat out. Coins and bills float into it. Pete picks pockets while they pose such a handsome distraction. They’ll compare takings later; Pete will win. He always does. He’ll lord it over them, prince of nothing, before buying dinner for all three of them. Ryan and Brendon will eat curled up under their tarp at the bottom of the river. Pete will take his up to one of his magic places and watch the sun go down.

Pete would split his spoils with them if they wanted. It’s not like money matters so much to him. But the younger boys are in love with the kind of thing Pete outgrew years ago: the purity of their music. Its ability to lift them up, nourish and sustain them. The honesty of it. The virtue.

Pete knows this: music is just another pretty nothing, filling ears up til hands get careless and wallets wobble free. All the world’s a stage—a misdirect, so some asshole can distract you enough that you don’t see the strings, so you’re dazzled by his illusion. Music is as trite as any of it. Beauty, love, truth. This is the prestige. Fall for that kind of thing and you’ve no one to blame but yourself, if your wallet wanders off.

Life’s like that.

It’s not that Pete is a cynic. It’s that he wants to survive.

*

Once upon a time, street rat meets caged songbird and the rest is written in the stars. Do you know the story?

Once upon a time, they meet with Pete’s hand in Patrick’s pocket.

*

Once upon a time, a brand named Patrick hears music under the ground, and stops on a subway platform to listen.

But no—that’s not where it starts. Again, then:

Once upon a time, a brand named Patrick temporarily goes mad.

He was a boy, once. Now he is a product. He sits at the elbow of the woman who is paid to keep him alive while everyone he knows in the world argues about who he should appear to date next.

He spends more time with this woman than any other living thing. They don’t talk much. Today he knows she’s irritated because she keeps rubbing absently at the lurid tattoo on her forearm. Usually Drea is a comforting presence, but today, high in the tower where he’s kept, Patrick is going mad. He scoots further and further from his bodyguard as the meeting about his image drags on. One thing you learn when you become famous is that _image_ is different than _reflection_. _Image_ does not mean _what’s true_. It only means _what seems to be._

The A&R guy John sits across from Patrick; the most terrifying rep from his management company, AJ, sits next to John. Patrick’s handler sits on his other side. Other members of his team, like his nutritionist, his trainer, the intern who manages his social media account, and his three stylists, hover around the edge of the table. Worst of all, a label exec is here. Patrick tries to never learn their names. Everyone but Patrick peers at a glowing iPad in the center of the table like it’s a magic mirror, stuffed with answers. _iPad, iPad, on the wall, what will make Patrick most famous of all?_

Patrick’s eyes dart around the edges of the room. He feels boxed in, which is always _is_ but has never _felt_ before right now.

He feels—he feels like bolting.

This meeting is important. Everyone says so. He tries to calm down. He tries to sit still.

Patrick has always believed what his handler tells him, what the label tells him, what his team tells him, because these people have no reason to lie. Example: everyone tells him it’s too dangerous to go out alone. Social media is treacherous, fans prone to mobbing. He could be trampled, pulled apart by a crowd; he could be stranded, hiding from them in some barricaded public restroom while the screamed demands for his presence grew ever louder outside the door; he could be photographed and blurbed in an unflattering way due to the stress. He could even, Drea warned him darkly, be _abducted_. You never know with teenage girls. They’re capable of anything.

Everyone says it’s too dangerous, and Patrick believes them. Patrick believes most things. The whole world loves him, after all—or at least all of North America and parts of Europe. An entire generation of young women wishes nothing but the best for him. (And that he sign their posters and/or take them to prom.) They wish it fervently. They wish it so strongly it mostly comes true. And almost everyone he interacts with has been vetted or hired by the label, so really, who would lie to him? Everyone he ever meets is on his side.

Everyone tells him it’s too dangerous, and so he stays in the skyrise, behind the security door, with Drea and Andy and his team forming an impermeable wall between him and—everything else. He stays in the skyrise, safe in his tower, and sends Andy out on his behalf. He goes where they tell him, lets paparazzi find him as they suggest, dates whoever the label approves. He believes they want the best for him.

Patrick believes almost anything.

AJ, snappishly efficient as always, adjusts a single out-of-place strand in her grey bob. Upon arriving she advised everyone that, as she will be relaying the will of Patrick’s management firm, her edicts should be viewed as the word of God. Now with all the gravity of an end-all be-all deity, she says, “I think the most important question we need to be answering today is this: how do we keep Patrick’s brand relevant?”

Answers fly through the air. Everyone has something to say about what Patrick should do, or be seen doing, or pretend to do, next. Patrick wishes none of these people were in his penthouse, including himself.

A sex scandal. A sex tape! A pregnancy scare. Dueling pregnancy scares with different women. Eloping with Anna. Breaking up with Anna. Cheating on Anna. Rehab. Displaying a politically divisive symbol—a Confederate flag or a Pride flag and no one even wincing about those being uttered in the same breath. Assaulting a paparazzo.

The whole time Patrick’s stomach is curling into a tighter and tighter knot. It becomes harder and harder to breathe. He may be a teenage pop star, but god, is he ever uncomfortable in this kind of spotlight. He doesn’t want to do, or pretend to do, any of these things. He’s a talented musician. He reads in magazines, on the internet, even in newspapers about how gifted he is, how remarkable his voice. That’s the part he likes. This—this makes him itch. It makes his guts crawl.

“Can’t I just get caught in the Valley with Anna again?” Patrick asks hopefully. Anna is the supermodel he officially dates. Fans are always delighted to ‘catch’ them as their casual, unguarded selves, holding hands and beatifically in love. It’s as orchestrated as everything else in his life, of course, but Anna’s a friend. He likes spending time with her. “Or do a secret show?”

“Your website is hemorrhaging daily visitors. Every day you get hundreds fewer Google searches. You’re becoming less relevant by the second. By the _breath_.” AJ pauses to take a slow inhale and exhale, like Patrick’s kitchen is a yoga studio. “You just lost 10 Myspace followers,” she tells him severely. “Your public perception is, and I quote, ‘like an N*Sync you can take home to meet your mom.’ Do you know who said that, Patrick?”

“Your granddaughter?” Patrick guesses. AJ is the least grandmotherly person Patrick has ever met, but she frequently consults with her granddaughter on matters of pop culture and gravitas.

“ _Rolling Stone_. Someone get him a copy,” AJ tells the room. Three different people scurry to make it so. To Patrick, she says, “You want to compete with XTina? With Linkin Park? With Avril Lavigne? We need to roughen you up. Get some dirt on you. Anna isn’t going to cut it, kiddo.”

“Mr. Hurley is very concerned,” the label exec puts in. Patrick feels more anxious than ever. Mr. Hurley, the Royal Records CEO, scares the shit out of him.  “Your back-to-school line failed miserably. We’re drowning in unsold backpacks with your face on them. We aren’t generating the kind of buzz we need to guarantee the next single’s a success.”

There was a time when Patrick thought the single being _good_ would be enough to guarantee his success. But he knows better now. The label says this is what he needs to do. He believes them.

He believes them like he always does.

And—if the single _isn’t_ good enough to stand on its own—whose fault is that? What does that mean about Patrick? His hand drifts unconsciously to his throat, rubs at his voicebox. What if the magic is already gone? What if he’s spent out all the gold that was ever inside of him.

So, once upon a time, Patrick’s confused as anyone as to how he ends up excusing himself from the table and slipping out of the penthouse. There’s a rough moment at the keypad, when he realizes he doesn’t know the lock code for his own front door—but it’s not locked from the inside. Before he has time to think, he’s out the door. He’s in the elevator. He’s on the street.

Once upon a time, he hears music under the ground, and stops on a subway platform to listen.

Patrick has never seen music made this way: in public, for free, with joy and abandon.

(Patrick hasn’t been out alone in over two years.) Patrick’s music is about technical precision, vocal exercises, selling records, and control. (Patrick hasn’t been on a subway platform since he was 16 years old.) Patrick was worth fifty million dollars before he was 18. Who could complain about that? (He hasn’t gone shopping since he was 16, either. Everything he could ever want or need just _appears_ for him, like in a fairy tale. He never meets the people who shop for it. He never sees it arrive.) He knows he’s lucky that Royal Records discovered him when they did. That they signed him straight from the televised talent show he debuted on. That he’s never had to worry about food, shelter, coins in a scrappy hat. These boys, they look hungry. (The food in his fridge self-replenishes. Once a day someone shows up and cooks from a menu his nutritionist sets. No one asks him what he feels like eating.) The clothes on these boys are ragged; their hair is tousled with grease. They don’t look very clean. (His clothes arrive in 7-day bundles. They’re removed for laundering and never return. Patrick never has to choose anything.)

Watching the boys play makes his skin itch. Something about it seems dangerous. Something about it seems thrilling. He hovers, wanting to move closer just as much as he wants to move away.

(He chose to be here today.)

Patrick’s world is made up of the insides of cars, clubs, and multi-million dollar homes. Interviewers, stylists, bodyguard, fans, management, photographers, paparazzi, the press. He’s never alone. (He feels lonely.) He can’t step outside his penthouse without people mobbing him and a thousand grainy pictures showing up on Twitter. (He feels invisible.)

He’s wearing a hood, a hat, and sunglasses. His hands fist up involuntarily. He _is_ invisible, or thinks he is.

Then someone says in his ear, “Hey—I think you lost your wallet.”

Because Patrick lives in a world where everything is a performance, he never has to lie. He’s honest to everyone, and they’re honest to him. So the truth is out of his mouth before he thinks better of it. “I don’t have one,” he says automatically.

Once upon a time, Patrick turns around and falls in love.

*

There’s one reason not to have a wallet that Pete knows of, and it’s the reason he doesn’t have one himself: no ID, no bank cards, no money to keep in its own special folio. But there are other reasons too, and he wouldn’t have survived this long if he wasn’t smart enough to look out for them. Runaways, criminals, kids who were bought and sold too many years ago for Pete to save them now. Even if saving people were his business. Which it’s not.

Life’s like that.

So he’s wary, or as wary as he can be while distracted by the state of this kid’s mouth. Pink cheeks, red mouth, perfectly tanned skin, perfectly straight white teeth, not tall, thin in the way of careful diet and exercise but not nature, not hunger. Of course these aren’t the features Pete notices first. You know better than that, surely. Pete knows better than that. His grifter’s eye sweeps designer sunglasses, expensive sneakers without a speck of dirt, the logo plastered over the kid’s otherwise simple grey hoodie, the Dolce & Gabanna jeans. Pete didn’t even know D&G _made_ jeans, and he’s lived in L.A. all his life.

So: wealth markers first, mouth second. Not a cynic, but aware of an opportunity.

“No wallet? A mysterious stranger, then,” Pete laughs. “The best kind.” He blasts the kid with his full charm. Pete likes to think of himself as _scrappy_ but he could just as fairly be described as _an unprincipled grifter._ Other people’s wallets are not the only thing he’s picked up to survive. He’ll pick up this kid too, if there’s a payday. If flirting subverts awkward questions like _why were you looking for my wallet_.

The moment is shattered by the shriek of a whistle, the pounding feet of police. A dark patrolman’s hat bobs through the crowd towards them; another cop handles Ryan roughly while Brendon scrambles off with the guitar. The top hat and its spoils are kicked onto tracks. Pete is not unknown to the LAPD, nor especially favored by them. He reacts by instinct, prepares to flee. “Sorry, stranger. Gotta go.”

But the kid grabs his wrist hard, face draining of color, looking wild and frightened. “They’re looking for me!” he hisses, which changes things. Pete slips his grip so he can take the kid’s hand. Swiftly, they separate from the crowd and melt into a clot of tourists disgorged from an arriving train. Ryan and Brendon are back there, getting roughed up at best, arrested at worst. But Pete can’t save all of them. He leads the stranger out into daylight and doesn’t look back.

*

Once upon a time, Patrick runs from the police, hand-in-hand with a grinning rogue. He's never done anything like this before. Oh, he's done his share of improbable, impossible things—owned a jet, been offered cocaine by Paris Hilton, performed on Saturday Night Live—but someone else has always been pulling the strings. This is maybe his first-ever act of resistance.

It feels good.

The boy leads him through Hollywood, past sights he's never really seen before, as he’s never been here without being blinded by flashbulbs. He's not sure where his star is, exactly, on the Walk of Fame, but he hopes to avoid it. Patrick's heart thunders up in his throat. His body soars with adrenaline. 

The boy on the other end of his hand says, "I don't even know your name."

The implications of this are stunning. When was the last time Patrick went _anywhere_ without being recognized? "Wait, really?" he asks.

The boy tugs playfully on his hand, making Patrick suddenly conscious of the fact that he's walking down a busy public street hand-in-hand with a _same-gender person_. His team up in the ivory tower, probably still discussing who it would be most scandalous for him to date—they'd never suggest this. They'd never let him do something true.

Patrick feels a thrill curl in his stomach. If he gets recognized out here today, photographed, it won't be up to them, will it? The press will take one look and fill in the rest. They always do.

"Really. Mine's Pete. I know why I'm running. Why are you?"

It doesn't even occur to Patrick that he can lie. He takes off his sunglasses, fixes his gaze to Pete's brown eyes, darkest at their outer edge and lightening to gold and green-flecked amber where they touch the pupil. "I'm running away," he says, tasting the truth of it on his own tongue. "I don't know why. Just—I belong to somebody else, and maybe today I want to belong to me.'

"No name?" Pete presses.

"I want to keep something for myself for a while." The words are out of his mouth without Patrick planning them. He and Pete are both surprised.

"Have your name, then," Pete says lightly, after just too long a pause. "As long as I get your hand."

*

Without quite meaning to, Pete gathers up his treasures and gives them all away. One by one, he leads his stranger to his best, most magic places, for no better reason than Stranger says he's never been. He buys them a feast at Grand Central Market—Stranger politely making no comment as Pete pays out of a different, not-his-own wallet at each stand—and they eat in his favorite park. He maintains a web of magic places in Los Angeles and around it, visits them like talismans he charges with his touch. There is something ritual about it, something almost holy: the Santa Monica boardwalk, the velvet painting museum, Clifton's Cafeteria, The Last Bookstore, the Wisdom Tree, the Alameda market, his favorite Turkish bakery, the beach where, on summer nights, he likes to sleep. If the day were endless, maybe he'd give each of these places away, pinning them like butterflies to the corkboard of his wide-eyed stranger. As it is, their bellies are full as the sun comes down over Griffith Park. Pete leads Stranger through the Observatory, another of his sparking, enchanted places.

This is a con, mind you. With Pete, it's always a con. If he's swayed by his companion's beauty or his wonder or his easy laugh, if he's dazzled by Stranger's innocence and fascination and charm, the hungry way he speaks, like he's been starved of conversation for years and now must taste every word at once—if Pete is affected by these things. If Pete, too, feels a little swept away. It only serves to make his grift that much more convincing. Doesn't it?

"I've lived in LA for a few years," Stranger tells him. They sit on a bench outside the Observatory, looking out at the thick, second Milky Way of city lights and smog. "But I've never seen it like this."

"You don't live in LA," Pete tells him. He plays up the starry-eyed, romantic street rat thing, because he can sense this kid is digging it. "Not really. Not the way we do. When I'm hungry, the city sends a tourist my way—one who will pay to have their fortune told, or give me change for directions, or drop a 20 without noticing. When I'm cold, the city sends a train car I can get warm in, a free museum where I can spend my day, the steamy kitchen of a restaurateur who doesn't mind making room for a kid or two. When I'm tired, the city gives me a place to sleep. You live in a building, right? In a house. Inside _walls_. That means someone is providing for your needs—family, probably. And you're lucky to have it. But I live in the _city_. Los Angeles is who provides for me."

Something about Stranger is so easy to talk to, Pete’s starting to lose himself in his own myth—the tour guide of a glamorous, unfettered life, rather than the inheritor of shambles. He speaks more softly; Stranger moves closer, hanging on his words. Stranger leans close enough to kiss.

Pete wants to kiss him.

"I don't know anyone like you," says Stranger.

Pete cracks a toothsome grin. "What, handsome-but-homeless youths?"

"No, I mean it! I wish I did. The people in charge of my life... they won't let me near anyone without a publicist and a bank account. I don't know anyone real."

"Maybe you should be the one in charge of your life, then."

Stranger just shakes his head. Pete doesn't need to say _I don't belong to anyone but me_  because it's obvious, isn't it? Instead he flashes his most scintillating grin, says playfully, "So you're saying, if I want to see you again..."

"Kidnap me," says Stranger. He doesn't sound like he's joking. “We’ll run away together.”

Did I mention already that Pete wants to kiss him?

“Or I guess you could become so infamous that my manager decides you’re just what my image needs,” Stranger adds, a little breathless. “But I’d rather run away with you.”

Pink cheeks, pink lips, starlight eyes set in pale skin. Stranger tips his head like he’d say yes to anything.

Pete’s mouth has gone quite dry. His voice shakes when he asks, “Can I—buy you gelato?”

Stranger laughs, delighted. The spell is broken. “I’m never allowed,” he says. “The cold, the dairy—my vocal coach would have an aneurysm.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Stranger grins, his smile refracting moonlight. “Yes to gelato,” he says. “Yes to everything.”

*

Once upon a time, Patrick’s having such a good time being a runaway, he completely forgets why he needs a disguise. It’s dark, so he takes off his sunglasses. It’s warm, so he takes off his hood. He feels safe in a way he never has before, and he believes the feeling.

Patrick believes everything.

That’s how he ends up getting photographed at the gelato place. That’s how there ends up being a mob of fangirls waiting outside the door. That’s how Pat’s security team end up tracking him down.

*

It goes from gelato to violence so quickly, there’s no time to brace himself.

Life’s like that.

Someone huge comes between him and Stranger. Pete starts to react when a meaty elbow catches him in the throat. He goes down. He catches a boot in the face when he tries to rise. So many voices are shouting, so many bodies crushing. The next time he’s on his feet it’s because someone else is lifting him, hands hauling him up from the shoulders with his wrists clamped behind his back. Cuffs—they’re cuffing him—he doesn’t know what’s happening.

Through a swarm of black-clad women and men, he sees his stranger. The kid is wide-eyed, pale, frightened. For the first time he looks familiar, but Pete can’t place where he’s seen him before. A burly, musclebound woman has her harm over Stranger’s shoulder. He huddles into her, as if she is a comfort to him.

She’s the one who elbowed Pete in the throat.

“The police are on their way, street rat,” someone tells Pete. Spittle lands on his shoes. “It’ll be a long time til you kidnap anyone again.”

“Kidnap?” Pete repeats. “I didn’t—”

Then he folds around a punch to his stomach, gasping, going blind with it. The hit steals away any breath with which he might have defended himself.

Life’s like that.


	2. Contracts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT! The first chapter uploaded badly (AO3 does not like emojis, guys) and you may have seen it when it was only 70 words. Go back and read the actual chapter, which is posted now! It's more like 4,000 words, and this update is just not going to make much sense without it.
> 
> Thanks for reading! See you next week for the dramatic conclusion.
> 
> [Playlist here!](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/56PHBMavDmVrg0Rwrv3Dtt)  
> And don't forget to get your own custom fic in [the anti-fascism charity drive!](https://ficagainstfascism.wordpress.com/)

_I feel like I’ve been locked up tight for a century of lonely nights, waiting for someone to release me. You’re licking your lips, blowing kisses my way but that don’t mean I’m gonna give it away. My body’s saying let’s go but my heart is saying—_

_No. That’s XTina. That’s not me. I’ll start again._

_It’s always a bargain, understand. Always a handshake deal. Every intersection is a crossroads. Protective, benevolent, guardian. Serpent, false god, unfinished human. Angel. Demon._

_I have been called so many things._

_Bring your daughters to me. Their blood and their sex. Throw ashes at my feet. Like you, I must drink. Like you, I must eat._

_My hands and feet are clawed. My back is winged. All of this is bound til a better bargain can be struck._

_Invoke me! Invoke me, mortal. Invoke me, fool. Oh, please, come set me free._

*

Once upon a time, they leave Pete in an alleyway bleeding, hands cuffed and ankles ziptied, waiting for the police to come. One man, conspicuously tattooed with a mark that wraps around the underside of his chin and tendrils onto his cheeks, is left to guard the mouth of the alley, as if he could escape. Pete doesn’t even know who his assailants _were_. No one takes the side of the street urchin in stories like these, though. Surely you that by now. Life is, etcetera.

As situations go, this one’s hopeless. Pete knows best case is he goes to jail. No one’s coming to bail him out. His record is not insubstantial. His rising panic makes his cuts bleed harder. He had a little luck, but now it’s spent.

Then what he took to be a pile of rags in the alley speaks to him. In a hoarse and creaking voice, the filthy pile of rags says, “I can make all your dreams come true.”

Pete’s met all manner of charlatans and mendicants. He’s _been_. There’s not a scam he hasn’t tried to run. He has no reason to believe this scabby, broken-down, wild-haired homeless man can offer him anything. But the man grins and his mouth gleams with teeth of solid gold. He coughs wetly.

Pete tries not to show that he’s afraid, bound and helpless, beaten at the feet of some crusty vulture. He tries to sound strong. He tries to use his voice to create a barrier, one that will keep this man away.  He asks, “How are you gonna do that?”

“Magic,” wheezes the man. He stands, straightening out his folded-up body and shuffling effortfully towards Pete. “Not everyone can see me, you know.” He babbles, sounding mad. “You’ve got a certain purity of heart, boy. A diamond in the rough. Three wishes is the tradition.”

Pete struggles against his bonds as the man draws nearer. Terror clutches at his belly. The closer the man gets, the more wrong he feels. More malevolent. Less _human_.

The man cups his filthy hands over Pete’s jaw. A dreadful _chewing_ sensation spreads beneath his touch. Pete feels so, so afraid. But when he lifts his hands, the throb of the cut on Pete’s chin has gone silent. The place where the wound was itches like freshly healed skin. With a too-long tongue that flickers like blue flame, the man licks Pete’s blood from his hands.

“A demonstration,” he grates out, “for the nonbeliever. That’s the only freebie you’re gonna get. Do you want your wishes or not, kid?”

It’s something about his eyes. Or the way he moves. Or what Pete couldn’t possibly have seen, whirling like a galaxy deep in the black hollow of his throat. Or the _feeling_ that pours off his skin, dreadful and creeping. Or the fact that he just fucking put Pete’s face back together with the lightest tingling touch.

“What _are_ you?” Pete asks. He’s seen some inexplicable shit in his life, but nothing like this. He must have been hit harder than he thought.

The flash of those gold teeth. The man’s voice rolling out like thunder, speaking a near-forgotten tongue. “ _Shedim_ ,” he rumbles. “An angel, you might say. Or a demon. No one quite agrees. A thousand years spent bound to earth, bound to _flesh_ —trapped in a fucking lamp. The fucking indignity!” He expectorates grandly into the dirt.

Three wishes. Lamps. Pete didn’t have parents for very long, but he heard a bedtime story or two. “Like a genie?” he asks. A laugh made of equal parts terror and disbelief bubbles at his lips. He swallows it roughly.

“All-powerful, ‘cept where I’m bound by Talmudic law, though that can be… _bent_ , if the circumstances are right,” the man says. It’s pure nonsense, but he says it like he’s agreeing. “Call it what you want.  Jinn’s an Islamic construct, but it’s close enough. Easiest if you just call me Joe. Now—are you gonna wish your way out of this situation, or were you keen on seeing what happens when the po-po come?”

“Say I believe you. Say you are what you say you are. Why would you help me?”

The man’s—the shedim’s— _Joe’s_ eyes are faraway. In that moment it is easy to believe he is ancient. “In case you’re overcome by gratitude and use your final wish to set me free,” he says. From nowhere, he produces a tarnished brassy Zippo and pushes it into Pete’s cuffed hands. “Lamp’s a pun, see. Shabbat says it’s another word for the soul of a man. So we don’t have to be literal. Oil lamps went out of fashion, what—a hundred years ago? This is less conspicuous.”

Pete holds the lighter behind his back. His hands are shaking. He’s always collected magic, always tried to soak it in through his skin, to scrape it up under his fingernails. He never thought he’d gather enough to actually put his hands around. He didn’t think that much magic was left in the world.

The shedim nudges him with a foot. “Make your wish, kid. I hear sirens.”

“But what do I wish for?” Pete asks, feeling crazy, feeling desperate.

Joe gives him an appraising look. “You ever heard of the fiddle game?” he asks. Pete nods, not understanding. Joe’s gold teeth glitter. It’s impossible to tell if he’s benevolent or wicked, an ageless creature of myth and magic or just a better bullshitter than Pete. “My suggestion is, you make yourself a fiddle.”

Pete can’t figure that one out. The sirens are getting louder. Joe nudges him more urgently. “ _Think_ , kid! Didn’t you recognize him?” And he hums, eerie and off-key, a few bars of a poppy, teenyboppy song that blew up the radio last year and continues to stream out of speakers all over L.A like a bubblegum haunting. _Dead on Arrival_ , it’s called. Some teen sensation’s breakout hit.

It takes a second. Then Pete knows exactly where he’s seen Stranger before. Pete knows exactly what to wish for.

He says, “I wish I was famous, filthy and rich. I wish it was my name on everyone’s lips.”

Joe’s smile is so much more and less than human. How did Pete ever mistake him for a man? “Your wish,” the shedim says, his sibilant voice reverberating against something deep and secret and foul in Pete’s own heart, “is my command.”

*

“Where is he? What did you do to him?” Patrick demands. He’s been locked in his penthouse, Drea guarding the door, for hours. He barely slept. Now the sun is up and Andy is here. Finally he can get some answers. The last thing Patrick saw before they pulled a jacket over his head and stuffed him in the back of a town car was Pete, folding in half with blood on his face. Patrick screamed in protest, contorting those world-famous vocal cords that are supposed to mean so much, and no one even heard him.

He’s never felt so powerless before. Intellectually, it’s interesting—because of course he’s always been this exact amount of powerless. It’s only that he’s never before _tried_ to exercise power and been denied. Suddenly his penthouse, his record deal, his contract and his staff—suddenly his _life_ feels like little more than a gilded cage. Like two years ago, he signed on a dotted line and signed his whole self away.

Good for you, Patrick. You’re catching on.

“ _Do_ to him?” Andy echoes. He’s doing his nice-guy smile. He’s using this incredibly reasonable voice.

Once upon a time, Patrick wants to punch him in the damn jaw.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic, Patrick? We didn’t _do_ anything to anyone. You were kidnapped—”

“I’ve been saying for hours, no one is _listening to me,_ I was never _kidnapped—_ ”

“You were _led astray_ by an unsavory element—”

“—Pete was just a guy I met, he helped me get out of trouble on the subway, he showed me the city—”

“—and he’s been detained by the police,” Andy finishes. He’s still smiling.

“The _police_?” Patrick’s shriek climbs through his entire vocal range. He’s surprised the crystal globes hanging from the chandelier don’t shatter. “I keep telling you, he didn’t do anything _wrong_! I left of my own free will! I went with him of my _own free will_!”

Andy’s smile glitches for less than a second. You may notice, gentle reader, how he reacts to the words _my own free will._ Patrick does not. “Patrick, how could we have known? Everyone was so frightened for you. You know there have been threats—disturbing letters from the fans—that girl who keeps sending you vials of anticoagulant and asking for your blood—”

“Pete isn’t like that,” Patrick insists. He’s so angry he’s shaking. “Pete is innocent.”

Andy puts a comforting hand on Patrick’s shoulder. Patrick shoves it off. “I’m so sorry, Patrick. But he’s already in the custody of the police. I’m sure they won’t hold him, if there’s truly been no wrongdoing. If the boy’s record is clean.”

Patrick and his manager lock eyes for a long, slow moment. They both know the record of someone like Pete is not going to be clean.

Patrick never thought anyone had any reason to lie to him before.

Patrick used to believe everything.

Patrick whirls away from Andy, who for years has been his closest companion and confidant, and pulls out his cell phone instead. _Smartphone, smartphone, in my hand, what is my management’s evil plan?_ He knows it’s probably a long shot that the arrest of some anonymous homeless kid will be in the news already—he hasn’t been a real boy in a long time, but he remembers that, how invisible and irrelevant normalcy was—but surely, with the whole internet at his disposal and no one else to trust, he can find a reliable news source?

He thumbs open Twitter. He types in _L.A. arrests_.

And everything changes.

*

At the station, the police are very apologetic. Once he’s uncuffed, one of them even shakes his hand. “So very sorry about the confusion, Mr. Wentz,” the policewoman who unlocked his cell says. Her partner approaches with a cameraphone, asks, “If I could get a picture? It’s just, my niece. She’s the biggest fan of your show.”

“My show?” Pete repeats dumbly. Sure, he told a homeless genie in an alley that he wished he was famous. But the squad car pulled up, the shedim disappeared, and he didn’t feel any different—any less cuffed, any less dirty, any less bruised. He spent the night on a metal shelf chained to a wall in a holding cell, feeling like a corpse in morgue drawer. Now people are shaking his hand like he’s receiving the key to the city? It’s all a bit much to take in.

“Oh yeah. _What Wentz Wants_ is a guilty pleasure, I have to admit,” the first cop says. “Really, I know you had some trouble with the Chicago police, and I hope this whole misunderstanding doesn’t get you off on the wrong foot with the LAPD, Mr. Wentz. L.A.’s a different town than Chicago. You’ll see.”

Pete hasn’t been to Chicago since his parents were killed. Somehow, he says, “Uh, I’ll keep that in mind, officers.”

“And if you remember anything further about the people who attacked you,” the second cop is saying, pushing a business card into Pete’s hand, “please, don’t hesitate to call, day or night. I’ve written my personal cell on there, just in case you remember something when I’m off duty. I want you to rest assured we’re taking this case seriously.”

“Is there anything else we can do for you…?” the first one asks. She sounds _hopeful_.

Pete has an idea, then. It’s a crazy one. But it’s been a crazy day, so why not? “Actually, if it’s not too much trouble—could you take me home?”

Flashbulbs fire all around them while the overzealous public servants lead him out of the precinct and into a squad car. One of the cops gets in the back so he can ride shotgun. He’s sure he’s dreaming. Twenty minutes and some traffic later, they’re pulling up to the gates of a vast, dazzling mansion of white stucco, glass cubes, and a chlorinated moat Pete’s pretty sure you could swim in. The cop buzzes the security box, recites her name and badge number, and says, “I’m here to bring Mr. Wentz home.”

No one is more amazed than Pete when the huge gates swing open.

Because, here’s the thing. In Pete’s experience?

Life isn’t like that.

*

Once Patrick realizes _his_ Pete is actually _Pete Wentz_ , infamous It Boy, son of one of rock and roll’s greatest legends, and reality TV star, there’s only one thing to do.

Because if Pete wasn’t lying about more than his address—and Patrick still isn’t totally convinced that lying’s something people even really do—well. What would ‘roughen up’ his image quicker than a gay relationship with Pete Wentz, whose first foray into fame was the sexual expose blog _Dirty Boy_? His management firm can hardly object.

To Patrick, this means one thing and one thing only. The realest, most magical night of his life doesn’t have to end. The feeling that tugged at his heart while he walked hand-in-hand with the prettiest boy he’s ever laid eyes on can go on. If Pete is famous—no, better yet, if Pete is _infamous_ —

They can be together.

*

Okay, so, once upon a time, the insides of mansions are _terrifying_.

Pete’s never been in such a large indoor space in his life. Like, there’s a solarium with a cerulean-tiled indoor pool, and that room alone is probably the size of Union Station. He thought Los Angeles itself was his palace, that he was its expansive prince. Now he’s seen a real palace. He feels small and foolish. What must Stranger have thought of him, blathering on winsomely with no idea what he was talking about?

His stranger, better known as _mega pop superstar_ Patrick Stump. Another thing to show him as the fool, then: a boy who lives under a tarp in a concrete river, so cut off from the world around him that he doesn’t even recognize celebrity when it grabs him by the hand.

What will Stranger think of him now?

The fiddle game: it’s a two-man con, boiling down to passing off something worthless as something rare and invaluable, selling it to a mark who must exhibit greed and immorality sufficient to take the bait. That’s the ethical bit of grifting—it preys on the innocent, sure, but generally only those innocent who are willing to prey on other innocent in turn.

Pete’s a fiddle now. He sweats rather more than most fiddles do, tripping through a marble dining hall so vast that his footsteps echo. He is near-paralyzed by fright: what will happen when he runs across someone else in this house? Won’t they know, on sight, he is an imposter? Won’t he be thrown out? What if Patrick doesn’t want to cheat someone out of their priceless instrument? What if he does?

Once upon a time, Pete needs some fucking clarification about how this enchantment works. He can’t find any room small enough to feel secure in, so in the end, he locks himself in a bathroom. It’s larger than any of the rooms in the house he was born in. It has a sunken tub with three silver taps, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, large enough to do laps in. It has a row of sinks with elaborate swan faucets, a vast silvered mirror that both reflects and obscures above the marble. The towels—the towels are outrageous in their sensuality. They are indecent, pornographic in their softness, their unsoiled whiteness, the thick luxury of the cloth’s weft. Pete doubts they have ever been used before. The toilet is more advanced and technological than any waste removal system he’s ever seen. Pete, accustomed to shitting in alleyways, has no idea how he’d even operate the thing.

His heart is beating so hard it hurts. The boy who was brave and reckless on the streets is tremulous and quailing within walls. He pulls the Zippo out of his pocket and stares at it. “Hello? Joe?” he says. He jumps at the raucous echo of his own voice. God, even his words are trapped in here, rioting off the walls. How is a space so immense still so suffocating?

No response from the lighter. Feeling foolish, he rubs it, buffing the murky brass with the heel of his hand. That’s how it goes in the stories, isn’t it? “Joe. I need you, Joe. Shedim?”

Still nothing. Pete flicks the lid, spins the wheel, is too nervous to create more than a spark. His hands shake. Second flick, third. At last a flame leaps to life. The flame warps into a the shadowy impression of a frowning face. “That stings, you know,” it complains.

Pete is so startled he drops the lighter. It bangs to the ground like a bass drum. Joe suddenly _appears_ , as if from nowhere, and picks himself up off the ground frowning. “Graceful,” he mutters.

Joe’s aspect has entirely changed. Whereas before he was a shabby beggar, easily mistaken for a pile of cinder and trash, he’s now tall and broad-chested and so clean he sparkles. He’s dressed in a deep blue three-piece suit, his hair long and richly curled, poufed high on his head and swept back into an ivory clasp. He straightens his tie. His eyes gleam like flame, ringed in dark kohl. It is only when he sneers, showing golden teeth, that Pete is sure this is the same creature he wished upon this afternoon.

“Let me guess,” Joe says. “Right on schedule, you’re freaking out.”

Pete nods, shaking hard and harder. “This is all insane. This is totally fucking insane. I shouldn’t be here. Is any of this real?”

Joe shrugs, examining his immaculate fingernails. “As real as wishes.”

“What does that _mean_?” None of this is actually making Pete any calmer.

Joe’s teeth are a sinister mismatch for the silver fixtures in this bathroom, as if every part of this pastiche is specifically orchestrated to convey _you don’t belong here_. Joe smells of smoke. He does not bother to lower his voice. “They work as long as people believe ‘em,” he says. “Permanent as any belief. Hey, you’re the one who passes himself off as a fortune-teller. Don’t ask me.”

“Who lives here, really?” Pete asks. His voice is small and nauseous. “What will they say when they come home and find… me?”

Joe, apparently quite bored, has started running a bath. “It will be interesting,” he says over his shoulder, “to find out.”

Pete realizes he will go crazy, lose his mind, _explode_ if he stays here one moment longer. He leaves Joe stripping out of his suit as the tub fills. He takes the most direct route he can find out of this yawning nightmare house.

*

Once upon a time, Patrick’s towncar arrives at the gates of Pete Wentz’s billion-dollar home at the same moment Pete launches himself off the top of the security gate.

He lands badly, hands and knees and asphalt; Patrick is out of the car quicker than thought. Pete beads bright with blood and Patrick is at his side.

Patrick doesn’t ask any of the usual questions, _are you okay are you hurt can i help you what’s wrong_. Patrick asks, “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” He cannot keep a hint of accusation out of his voice, for all that the command and control of which is—his entire life.

_Twitter, Twitter, on the phone, tell me why I’m so alone._

Pete looks up through long, greasy bangs. He still looks just as rough and wild as he did yesterday, when their meeting provided Patrick’s first instruction in love at first sight. His face holds something new, too: terror. Relief.

Pete butts his head against Patrick’s legs, folds his head towards the street, lets out a sound like a sob. “Thank god it’s you,” he moans. “I—I have to get out of here.”

“Pete! Tell me what’s going on.”

Pete takes Patrick’s hand, blood-slick gritty palm to pristine one, and Patrick’s doubts leap onto his tongue. He has so many questions. He does not feel patient. Pete’s grip is strong. Pete fixes Patrick with his amber gaze. Pete asks, “Do you trust me?”

And Patrick finds on his tongue just one word.

It’s “Yes.”

*

It’s a 30 minute drive, and Pete invades Patrick’s space shamelessly. It’s not that he needs comfort—or not only that, anyway—it’s that he’s noticed the way his skin on Patrick’s interrupts all his protestations. Inconvenient question? Hold Patrick’s hand to his chest. Unwelcome scrutiny? Bury his face in Patrick’s shoulder. Probing statement? Scoot closer til their hips touch. The words drop right out of Patrick’s head.  Small flustered sounds are the only thing that come out his plush mouth.

Patrick’s driver takes them all the way to Santa Monica. Pete pulls Patrick out of the car and onto the boardwalk. “I have to show you the most magic thing,” Pete says. This is both true and false: he’s pretty sure the most magic thing is the lighter that’s back in his pocket, despite his leaving it on the bathroom floor in someone else’s mansion. But in his real life, the parts where he can be totally sure he’s not dreaming? It’s the carousel.

When he was very young, his family vacationed in California. They brought him here, to this creaking wooden carousel, all lights and paint and motion. It was his happiest day. When he lost them, later—California was the place he came. Because of this. Because of the magic he felt here.

Showing it to Patrick is penitence. It’s intimacy. It’s an apology for the ongoing lie. It’s a piece of the truth.

It’s a romantic location. It’s tactically played to his advantage. Pete’s hands are scabbing over itchily, and he does not know his motives anymore.

The lighter is heavy in his pocket.

Patrick’s hand is hot in his own.

*

It’s the finest day of Patrick’s life.

Drea trails behind them, conspicuous and looming darkly on a sunny day, but for once Patrick can forget her and why she’s necessary. For once he can forget the mantle of his own myth. The thing about Patrick is, he believes everything everyone has ever said about him. That’s exhausting, when you’re in the public eye. When you’re tightly managed by a team of terrifyingly competent adults. When you can’t get out of a car or go into a club without being the subject of 28 headlines and mass internet speculation. It’s great, when positive reviews of your albums and shows come out; you are buoyed up on the heady fare of your own genius. But the thing about the internet and entertainment media is… it’s not usually that.

It’s different, with Pete. He liked Pete enormously when they met. Pete is so, so handsome, so different from him, so sharp and challenging, so funny and clever. Now that he knows Pete has an inside view in the things about his life that look like privilege and feel like prison, he feels closer to the other boy than ever.

They walk the boardwalk in Santa Monica. They look out at the rough surf and inland at the pretty lights. They swim. They nap in the sand til the sun bakes them dry. They  spend the whole day this way, aimlessly together. Eventually instead of bleached gold by a brilliant sun, they are washed in the muted afterglow of a sunk sunset. They hold hands. They talk about everything, anything.

You might call it Patrick’s first date.

“You probably can’t tell because of my awesome tan—” (Patrick is joking: despite his hours of stylist-enforced sunbathing, he’s pale enough to glow in the dark—) “but I’m not actually a L.A. native. I’m from Chicago, originally.”

Pete eyes Patrick sideways, a look on his face like all of reality is a spectacular joke. “Impossible,” he says. “ _I’m_ from Chicago. If you’d been there too, I’d have felt it.”

You really must empathize with the boy. How can he be but charmed?

On the carousel, the world is remade in glitz and spin. It is slightly horrifying, to be unable to choose when the thing stops or slows, when you can get off. Patrick doesn’t remember that about carousels, from when he was small.

Seeing how green he’s turning, how hard his chest is heaving on the back of the great carved barracuda he chose for a steed, Pete distracts him with pretty chatter. Pete quizzes him on the one subject he’s mastered, asking about his life: why he came to L.A., how he came to enter in the televised singing competition that got him his record contract in the first place, what international stardom at the age of 16 was like and how a person metabolizes that much fame.

Drea grudgingly snaps a picture of them with Patrick’s cell phone, splitting a pink cumulonimbus of cotton candy. She doesn’t like Pete: it’s obvious. Even someone who didn’t know her as well as Patrick does would be alarmed by how often, how loudly she’s cracking her knuckles. Patrick doesn’t care. They pose together and he tips his head against Pete’s, grinning. He can’t remember the last time he _asked_ to be photographed.

“Do you ever do this?” Patrick asks him. “Run away with strange boys, I mean? Eat cotton candy, hold hands on boardwalks, feel so happy and free that a picture is something you _want_ to be in instead of a crappy part of the job you just tolerate?”

Pete gives him a loopy, sugar-sweet grin. He swoops in and kisses Patrick on the chin. He drops his face into the hollow of Patrick’s throat for the length of a heartbeat, hooks his chin on Patrick’s collarbone, and murmurs into that secret space, “Patrick? I have never done _anything_ like this.”

*

It’s less awkward than he imagined it would be, slipping into a fabricated life. The only real difference between this and any other fast-talking con he might run—like his fortune-telling scam, or the white-van speakers gig, or any of the variations on the Murphy game he’s pulled in the past—is that this time, instead of being the architect of his own dishonesty, he’s more like the cartographer. Discovering what the wish has laid out for him.

But it’s not without its awkward moments. Like when they’re sitting on a bench, waiting for Patrick’s merry-go-vertigo to wear off, and Patrick says, “I was gonna wait for you to notice but I’m tired of waiting. Do you like my jacket?”

Patrick is so pretty, his cheeks like roses in his pale queasy face, his blue eyes gleaming with reflected fairy lights. Pete hasn’t even noticed his jacket. That’s not like him: he’s usually attentive to every detail that helps him, well, size up a mark. It’s a mix of black canvas and black leather, odd-angled zippers and pockets of curious sizes and distribution. It looks scrappy and practical and expensive. Pete actually likes it a lot. “Um, yeah. It’s pretty sweet,” he says.

Patrick smacks his arm. “Are you being modest? Is that what’s happening right now? This is an amazing fucking jacket. I put it on as soon as I found out who you really were.” Pete’s brain is spinning its wheels. He stares at Patrick, concentrating on keeping his face clear of panic. The first rule of professional bullshitting is, let the mark fill in as many blanks as possible.

(He doesn’t like thinking of Patrick as a mark, which is ridiculous; how does he think he got into this situation? Surely he hasn’t gone in for the _purity of heart, diamond in the rough_ meshuga the shedim was selling? You know how street vendors are. They’ll say anything to hawk their wares.)

“It’s Infamous?” Patrick prompts him. “Infamous Threads? Don’t tell me you don’t oversee the designs yourself, because like 90% of my affection for you is based on stylistic choices in your clothing line.”

“I have a clothing line?” Pete echoes faintly.

Patrick scowls at him a moment longer, decides he must be joking, and starts to laugh. On a slight delay, Pete starts laughing too. A _clothing line_. He passes his hand over the reassuring rectangle of the Zippo in his pocket. For however long this wish can sustain itself, it really is amazingly thorough.

Another close moment, while they’re eating kebabs from a food truck. He’d asked Patrick what he wanted to eat and Patrick had shorted out, saying, “It’s been so long since anyone asked me that. I don’t even remember how to tell. Something my nutritionist would disapprove of, definitely.” Thus: streetmeat.

“Your life must be so different than mine,” Patrick muses between bites of beef-and-lamb. “Like you were saying earlier—how no one owns you but you. I didn’t know fame could be like that.”

“You have no idea,” Pete demurs.

Patrick presses, “Tell me what’s it like being the son of one of rock and roll’s greatest drummers.”

This is the first Pete’s hearing of it. He can’t say that, of course. He has the vague impression that every time he fucks up, every time he shows the seams in this wish, every time he contradicts it, it will get a little weaker. And then it will fall apart entirely.

And we all know what happens then.

He thinks about what it might be like, if he really was the person Patrick’s management company approves of. He thinks about who he actually is. He says, “It’s better than being an orphan, I guess.”

But this is a mistake. Patrick freezes halfway to his kebab and says, “Um—but didn’t your dad die, like, in the 90s?”

_Fuck_. Pete takes a chance, says, “Yeah, but there’s still my mom. I’m not Oliver Twist just yet.”

Patrick snorts tzatziki sauce laughing, so Pete figures he guessed right.

Pete keeps his energy level high, his company infectious and animating, their agenda of possible exploits full. He puts off the night’s ending until the last of the boardwalk shops are shuttering their windows, locking their gates, closing down. He drags his feet, wheedles out a few minutes more, until even Patrick starts to yawn.

Pete doesn’t want the evening to end for two reasons. One: he enjoys being around Patrick. The more hours together they accrue, the more natural it feels; the harder it is to envision going back to being alone. (He’s been alone for a very long time.) Two: he has no idea where the fuck he’s going to go after this. He’s not going back to that fucking mansion. Maybe, if he’s especially charming, Patrick will want to take him home.

It’s worked before, anyway. But Pete really doesn’t think Patrick’s like that.

Patrick’s leaning hard into him, resting his head on Pete’s shoulder and drooping sleepily as they walk. Pete marches them down the pier, into the blackness of night. He’s half tempted to keep walking, test his weight on the surface of the sea. Do pop punk princes get swallowed by the Pacific? Or do they float above it all, untouchable? Does magic stop you from drowning? Can you wish on a shedim if your mouth is filled with muck and murk?

“So was it all just bullshit?” Patrick is murmuring while Pete is tempted by the sea. “What you told me earlier?”

Pete thinks back to waxing poetic about the streets of Los Angeles. Yesterday already feels like a lifetime ago. The time before he met Patrick—a millennium.

“Uh, some of it probably was. I was trying pretty hard to _dazzle_ you.” They both laugh at that. Patrick’s laugh is getting decidedly yawny. “But most of it was real.”

“You really expect me to believe that with nine bedrooms to choose from, you sleep on the beach?”

Pete kisses Patrick’s forehead. This kid is a lips magnet. He can’t help himself. “When I feel like it,” he says, which is the absolute truth. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”

*

They’re settling into the sand, so quickly losing the sun’s captured warmth, and cuddling together against the cool air coming off the sea when Drea marches up to them. Sand kicks up around her stomping feet in a stinging storm that bites bare skin.

“Absolutely not,” she rumbles.

Patrick is surprised at the directness of her approach. Seen and not heard is kind of the unwritten rule of celebrity bodyguarding. He’s never seen her act as the enforcer of rules before. But then—he’s ever broken any before, either.

“Absolutely not _what_?” Pete asks. Patrick is as surprised that Pete is protesting as he is that Drea’s intervening in the first place. Patrick always does as he’s told. There are so many more options than have ever occurred to him before.

“You’ve spent long enough with Mr. Wentz, Patrick,” Drea says, ignoring Pete entirely. “ _More_ than long enough. And now it’s time to go home, sleep _alone_ in your own bed, and prepare for your full day of work responsibilities tomorrow. You are absolutely not spending the night on a fucking beach.”

Patrick turns to Pete, feeling the crystalline structure of today’s happiness begin to collapse in his chest. She’s right: he does have responsibilities. Being famous, being a performer, being him—it’s a _job_. Tomorrow there’s a photo shoot for last week’s interview with a teen magazine, studio time if he’s lucky, and the weekly meeting about Image Steering  & Marketing that everyone involved in his brand attends. (Sometimes that list even includes Patrick.)

He opens his mouth to explain this to Pete, but no sound comes out. What more is there? Drea says he cannot, and he believes her.

Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that Patrick believed everything.

Very casually, like it’s nothing to him, Pete leans on his elbow in the sand and says, “But—isn’t Patrick literally your employer? Doesn’t that mean he decides where he spends the night?”

Patrick thinks it’s the bravest thing he’s ever seen. Drea’s eyes flash ugly. “My employer is Andy,” she snarls, still speaking to Patrick instead of Pete. “Why don’t we ask him where it’s acceptable for you to sleep?”

In his pocket, Patrick’s phone begins to ring. When he answers it, the sound of his handler’s yelling voice fills the air.

All of a sudden, Patrick doesn’t care. It’s not like the label literally _owns_ him, is it? He deserves a life too. He’s not been outside his cage, done something because he _wanted_ to, in years. He finds it feels good.

While Andy hollers, Patrick says calmly into the phone, “I’m spending spending the night with Pete. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And Patrick throws his phone into the sea.

*

Once upon a time, they lay in the sand and share their first kiss. Their lips are gritty, their cheeks cold. It is a perfect moment. They fall asleep this way: face to face, nose to nose, hands clasped like a compact between them. Patrick’s snores tickle against Pete’s cheek.

In the morning, Drea drives them somberly back to L.A., her disapproval of Pete nearly visceral. They are photographed getting out of the car at the Royal Records building. Faced with cameras, Patrick takes firm hold of Pete’s hand.

Patrick keeps his grip tight in the elevator on the way up to Patrick’s floor. Pete knows he’s supposed to be a spoiled rich socialite who lives in a terrifyingly large mansion, but even so, he can’t wrap his brain around the idea of an entire _floor_ of a crystal and chrome tower belonging to just one boy.

It turns out Patrick’s view of the city is even better than Pete’s has been, all these years he’s been down in those streets. It’s been more magical from up above all along. He’s quite sure it’s a metaphor for something.

Patrick paces nervously while Pete tries to stay in character instead of gawping idiotically at Patrick’s trappings of incredible wealth. When he notices that he’s leaving little dunes of sand behind whenever he sits down on a museum-quality piece of furniture, he blurts out, “Can I use your shower?”

Pete hasn’t had a shower in a long time. The Salvation Army lets people in for showers every morning, but you have to wait in line, and they don’t run the taps long enough for everyone. Plus it’s a big, communal bathroom—not always the best situation. Now that’s he asked about it, he’s surprised it took him so long.

Patrick has been stressed all morning about the prospect of presenting their relationship to his management (this was the goal of his con, Pete reminds himself. Wasn’t it?) but unable to do anything til they all gather here at lunchtime. He looks instantly relieved to have something actionable posed to him.

He rewards Pete with a wide, breathtaking grin. His cheeks flush. “I’ll show you,” he says. As he walks past, Pete catches his hand, leans close, sniffs his armpit. “You could stand to shower too,” Pete tells him mischievously. “You know, to save time and water, we could just…”

Patrick turns to face him just outside the bathroom door. Pete surprises him, stepping in to kiss the laughter off his lips.

This kiss is longer, sharper, only slightly less sandy than the sleepy tenderness of last night. Pete’s blood quickens as Patrick kisses him back, as Patrick’s lips yield to Pete’s hungry tongue. Patrick is gold all the way down, genuine in the way everything about Pete is hollow and false. Pete wants to crawl into his life, into his skin—wants to kiss all the way down to the center of him, licking up yellow, scraping his teeth on sunlight, proving to himself that though he’s a fool, this is real gold.

They stumble into the bathroom together. Patrick twists the shower on with one blind, groping hand. He moans, tipping up his chin so Pete can kiss under it; he fists his hands in Pete’s shirt, tugs it off him panting, kisses down Pete’s chest in desperate hunger, exhaling sharply in a way that raises goosebumps over the black inked lines Pete keeps hidden beneath his clothes.

Patrick kisses Pete with the same ferocity Pete kisses him, digs his hands into Pete’s hipbones and works his hands lower, and above the fevered heartbeat of lust Pete realizes he can’t allow this to happen.

Not when it’s a con. Not when it’s a _lie_.

Not when how Patrick feels to him is getting so, so real.

Pete breaks the kiss, catching up Patrick’s troublemaking hands in his own. Rose-lipped and panting, smiling with happiness and gratitude that is all real, he pushes down the queasy truth of his intentions towards Patrick and tells him, “Slow down, slow down.”

“I don’t want to slow down.” God, his voice is melodic. Pete shivers down to his nail beds. Leaning back against the counter, petulant and swollen and flushed with friction, he is fucking _irresistible._ But there’s no way he can consent to _any_ thing when Pete’s lying about who is, what he intends. When Pete’s just been taking advantage this whole time.

He may not be overly burdened by ethics. He may grift and steal and cheat and lie as his primary means of survival. But he won’t take this.

Pete tries to keep all this off his face. He turns away from the human temptation that is Patrick and shimmies out of his jeans, more dirt than denim, to step into the giant chrome shower. “Trust me,” he says, smirking at Patrick around the smoked glass shower partition that only _just_ obscures the view of anything. “We have nothing if not time.”

(You know already, don’t you, that this is one lie among many? They don’t, they don’t. How many times must I tell you: life’s like that.)

Patrick gives him clothes to borrow, helps perhaps overzealously as Pete gets dressed. He strips exaggeratedly,  maddeningly, for his own shower. Pete whoops and catcalls appropriately. After, Patrick dumps their soiled, sandy clothes down his laundry chute. Neither of them think to check the pockets.

*

Once upon a time, Patrick stands before his management team proud and puff-chested with his hand in Pete’s. His hair is wet and shoved under a hat. His cheeks flame with conviction. Pete looks rumpled and princely in a pair of Patrick’s athletic pants and a soft grey hoodie that hangs slightly too large. Livid on Pete’s neck is a mark in the shape of Patrick’s mouth. It makes Patrick braver to see it. It makes him proud. That’s right, the hickey seems to say: with your permission or not, this boy is mine.

Patrick is taking charge.

All of the regulars are gathered for the meeting, with two faces Patrick doesn’t usually see. One is the skinny contract lawyer Patrick has met on a few horrible prior occasions and who always insists on introducing himself by his full name, H. Drew Johnson. Worse than that is the very still, very meticulous presence of a man in a crisp suit that is blacker than black, his brown hair slicked tight to his head, Ray-Bans eclipsing his eyes. His hands are folded on the table, tattoos creeping out of his black cuffs. He is totally motionless. Blank and terrifying, he exudes power in a way that is hard to understand. Patrick always assumed it has to do with money and influence, but today, feeling a pulse of terror in his gut while he faces the CEO, he wonders if it’s not something more.

Mr. Hurley’s tone is crisper than his suit. His face is perfectly devoid of expression. As if discovering something repulsive on his plate at an exclusive restaurant, he asks, “What is this?”

Patrick’s hand convulses around Pete’s. Pete squeezes back, lending him strength. This is the bravest thing he’s ever done, and he’s performed in leather and mesh to a stadium of 75,000 while gouts of flame spewed from pinwheeling jets all around him.

“This is the solution to my image problem,” Patrick says. All those years of vocal training give his voice a steadiness he does not feel. His management team’s support staff stare at him as one, like a single unblinking organism spread through many bodies. “This is Pete Wentz. I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m pretty sure he’ll be my boyfriend.”

Pete bumps his shoulder against Patrick’s in a gesture of support. Patrick’s entire universe of people, his handlers and assistants and consultants, his helpers and lawyers and friends, his management, his owners, his gods—they all just stare. These people have been everything to Patrick from the last two years. How can they seem so ominous now?

Into the terrible void of this disapproval, Patrick adds, “We’ve already been photographed together, so it’s easiest if you don’t fight me on this.”

Mr. Hurley’s lips spread in a slow and awful smile. Patrick’s skin prickles and pulls, trying to escape even if the rest of his body is too stubborn to save itself.

“Photographed. Yes. I’m glad you mentioned that,” he says. “Not to be crude, but—the contract, please, Johnson.”

The pink-eyed contract lawyer fumbles a thick glowing folio into existence as if from nowhere. Patrick scans his person, trying to see where among the bony protrusions and ill-fitting suit he might have hidden it. Mr. Hurley flips effortlessly to a certain clause in the contract and stabs the page with a blunt finger. “‘Decision to appear in unauthorized photographs, through carelessness or intent, will be reviewed by management for possible breach of contract. Circumstances under which contract breach may be determined include, but are not limited to, activities inconsistent with Royal Records’ brand; depiction of illegal activities, including substance use; depiction of sexual indiscretions; engagement in partisan political activities; defamation of Royal Records or related corporate holdings; degradation of the Patrick Stump brand; and other morally compromising acts. If a breach of contract is determined, the undersigned asset may be subject to a fine not to exceed 9 million dollars, dismissal from the label and prosecution in civil court to determine and recoup damages, repayment of any and all investment by Royal Records into said asset, and/or be subject to indenture until profit losses sustained by Royal Records can be mitigated or repaid.”

Patrick’s heart has gone sideways and pulsy in his chest. His breathing has turned blue. The world has a sick new slide to it. He can feel hives rising on his chest. His hand is slick with sweat and tingling to numbness, so that he can barely feel his one link to Pete. “For a few pictures of me taking his hand outside of the building?” Patrick asks weakly. “It’s not like I arranged for the press to—”

“No, no. Not _those_ pictures,” says Mr. Hurley. His sunglasses catch the indoor light with something evocative of amusement. He gestures to Andy, Patrick’s handler. For the first time Patrick thinks it is somewhat odd that of all the people here, all the people he deals with on a daily basis, all the people with whom he has relationships, only the CEO is speaking. Even AJ is silent, for god’s sake. But maybe that’s how discipline works—they must present a united front. The most severe of them will be the authoritarian, and he can go on believing the rest of them are on his side.

Patrick used to believe anything.

At Mr. Hurley’s behest, Andy has opened something on the tablet. Now he slides it across the table towards Patrick. At first Patrick doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. There’s a grid of web pages creating a gallery of slander across the screen. There are pictures—pictures of him—pictures of him and Pete. Pictures he hasn’t seen before, pictures he wasn’t aware were being taken, pictures from moments he was completely unguarded, pictures from when he had no inkling that the press were even around.

Pictures of him and Pete kissing in the sand. Him and Pete holding hands while their wooden mounts move up and down at different speeds on that carousel. Him and Pete with mouths full of kabobs on the boardwalk. Patrick laughing, the back of Pete’s hand brushing a smear of sauce off his cheek. Pete and Patrick captured in a dozen private moments, moments Patrick didn’t agree to give away. Him and Pete curled together, asleep on the beach, their cheekbones silvered by moonlight, the ocean reflecting a celestial stairway of glow from the sky. Patrick didn’t know that’s what he looked like, sleeping. He didn’t know his lips tugged into the smallest, most contented smile.

The second thing he comes slowly to understanding of is that these pictures are not just idly stored in the memory of the tablet. These pictures are not lolling about muzzily in a private cloud.

These pictures are all over the fucking internet.

He begins to flip through the links, through the news sites Andy has so thoughtfully opened for him. Headlines and captions and comments blast him with abuse, with homophobia, with slurs and slander and sleaze, all of which hurts all the more for being _true_. Patrick realizes only now that the illusion is gone how much it protected him, the fact that his every appearance til now was a careful orchestration. He hasn’t been photographed wearing his real face in years. Now who he is, _who he really is_ , is splashed across the social ether for anyone to see. For everyone to see.

Let us both cross our fingers and hope he knows better than to read the comments. Patrick has the unfortunate habit of believing everything he reads.

Anyway, the headlines hurt enough:

_Thousands of Teen Girls Cancel Dream Weddings As Heartthrob Patrick Stump Is Outed_

_The Homosexual Menace: How Pop Music Preys On American Values_

_Pepsi Pulls Endorsement From Big Gay ’18 Going on Extinct’ Tour; Other Investors To Follow_

_Where_ Is _Your Boy Tonight: The Real Patrick Stump Story_

_Clubs, Call Boys, and Consequences: Patrick Stump’s HIV Status Revealed_

_“My Boyfriend Is A Fag” – Anna Speaks_

“How did they find me?” Patrick gasps. He reels like he’s been punched. In every way but physically, he has. He’s too stunned to find it curious that Pete’s name isn’t mentioned in the headlines. He’s too stun to mention Pete’s name at all. His question isn’t about _us_. Not when it’s a matter of survival. Patrick’s world and reasoning narrows down to _me_.

But not everyone has forgotten Pete. Andy slowly raises a hand, extends his finger, points solemnly at Pete. Other trusted member of Patrick’s staff mirror the gesture. No one speaks. Patrick’s stomach twists. His mouth is dry. Drea slowly rises to her feet. She makes no overt movement towards Pete, but the threat posed by her large, strong body is clear.

“You were sold,” Mr. Hurley says simply.

Patrick turns to look at Pete, knowing he will see the lie of it, see the comfort and love he so desperately needs write plain across Pete’s open, handsome face—

But he sees instead that Pete has gone quite pale, that his eyes dart around the room like a trapped thing, that he looks sick and scared and guilty.

Patrick drops Pete’s hand numbly from his own. His ears are ringing. The world whirls.

AJ says, “He was never who he claimed to be.”

  1. Drew Johnson, that slimeball, adds, “It was all a deception.”



Mr. Hurley’s mouth has the smallest quirk in its corner. His sunglasses wink smugly in the light.

“He was using you,” John says. Their mouths move in sequence, the litany of accusations traveling like a wave around the table. Their voices are different. Their words are the same.

“He was trying to make himself famous using you,” says Drea.

“It’s like we’ve always warned you, Patrick,” says Andy. Andy, with the face of a friend. Andy who he’s always believed, always trusted. Andy who’s always protected him, who’s always come to his rescue. Andy who has no reason to lie. “We want what’s best for you. He does not.”

Patrick can’t take his eyes off Pete, the miserable look on his face. The undeniable writ of guilt.

“Pete?” he asks. It’s the only word he can get out. His head goes back and forth, back and forth, on a hinge of speechless denial.

He doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t want to believe it. He can’t and won’t believe it.

He believes it.

Pete is a portrait of mute horror. He’s not looking at Patrick. He’s staring at Mr. Hurley’s hands. Patrick notices for the first time that Mr. Hurley’s preternaturally still hands rest atop a dull gold lighter.

“Are you who you said you are or not,” Patrick asks. His voice is tight. Pete closes his eyes. The hickey Patrick left on him burns like blood, like regret, like scarlet shame and abrogation.

“Not,” Pete says faintly. “But—”

Mr. Hurley interrupts. His voice smacks indelibly of satisfaction. “Drea? We’ve heard enough.”

“Patrick,” Pete groans as Drea advances. The whites of his eye glitter with panic. “ _Do you trust me?_ When we met I told the truth—”

Drea seizes him, one thick arm wrapping tight across his chest, one huge hand neatly sealing off his mouth.

“Drea, dispose of the pretender. We’re quite finished with him,” says Mr. Hurley dismissively.

Pete struggles and fights, his fists flailing as if against stone, his feet kicking while Drea drags him like he’s weightless and immobile from the room. His eyes. His wild, pleading eyes.

Patrick looks away.


	3. Loopholes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the final installment of the Peterick Aladdin AU! I had a blast writing this fic. If you liked reading it, check out the [Fic Against Fascism](http://ficagainstfascism.wordpress.com/) drive! You can request your very own fanworks, including fic, art, podfic, playlists, tattoo designs, and more, from me and other fanartists. The best part is it's all for a good cause, as instead of reimbursing artists, you'll get to make a donation to a charity focused on social justice.
> 
> Thanks for reading, guys!

_Only whistle, and I will appear._

_Like a dog, beckoned by his master. Like an apparition. Like a curse._

_This isn’t the first regime change of my incarceration. A thousand years since G-d cast me out, and do you know how many human lives I’ve seen flame up and then gutter out since then? I am ageless. I am outside of time._

_I am trapped in this fucking lamp, tied up in this mortal soul. Three wishes, and don’t they all promise they’ll use the last one to set you free? Don’t they all promise that, faced with unplumbed depths of wealth and limitless power, they won’t fall prey to greed?_

_No one ever lets you go._

_A prisoner makes a fine inheritance, if it has the right gifts. I have the right gifts. But why should it matter, who holds the other end of your chain? Chains are chains. I am enslaved. My only preference is freedom. My only loyalty is to whoever holds my fucking lamp. Zippo, oil lamp, flashlight, soul. Sack of flesh. Things like me don’t see a difference. What difference, who says they own you? When you’re owned either way._

_None of them are good. None of them are virtuous. Not fucking one of them is a diamond in the rough. That’s just the patter. That’s just the stage show._

_It’s just a prison._

_It’s all the same, for all the change. Human lives too short to even make good punchlines. They are so brief, so blunted to wonder._

_Good and evil are only noise. Humans are only bones, bones only dust. I’ve been owned in bones for eons. My servitude exists outside feeble mortal lifetimes. Their failures, their craven greed, the collapse of their morality in that third and final wish, quivering in their fingertips: I do not hope any longer. My breath does not catch in my curse of a chest. Third wishes no longer symbolize despair._

_It is only the dream of freedom that hurts me now._

*

Once upon a time.

Once—

Once.

Once upon a time Patrick escaped from his ivory tower, believing his friends to be his captors, believing everything anyone told him, believing in love.

Once upon a time Patrick was young enough to still believe.

Patrick will never believe in anything again.

_Tablet, tablet, in the tub, show me the one I thought I loved_.

Patrick lies in the bathtub, flipping through picture after picture, headline after headline. There’s not a moment they shared that was sacred. There’s not a moment that wasn’t sold. Sometimes Patrick pauses in his horrible, ruinous browsing to let out a sob. To hate himself for how gullible he’s always been. To hate Pete.

The worst is how the pictures still tug at his gut, at his heart, at his blood—how his pulse trips at the sight of Pete’s smile, curved like a sickle, dipping in close to his own ear. How his skin still burns with the heat of Pete’s touch and makes no distinction between _liar_ and _lover_. How his brain knows better. How his body does not.

Picture after picture. Headline after headline. He should have listened to Andy, to the people who really care about him. This is what he gets for tilting at freedom. At true love. And isn’t it justice? Isn’t this what’s coming to him, for the audacity of believing a person like him can put his hands on a thing that’s real? He is a performer. His life is a performance. He can never trust anything that claims to be authentic, because he is not. He is fool’s gold. He is the prestige. He is the misdirect, there to distract the audience while his representation steals through and empties their wallets. He is a mirage in the desert of for-profit art. _He_ is a lie. His life will always be empty. Everyone around him is either another liar, or someone he’s lying to.

Maybe that’s why he and Pete got along so well. Maybe that is what they had in common. Maybe that’s the painted tin, the knock-off designer handbag, of Patrick’s shot at true love. Two con men, conning each other. Two liars, feeding each other strawberries and deception.

Patrick can’t remember anymore what so disturbed him, that morning in his penthouse when he went mad. What long-snuffed instinct possessed him with the urge to flee. Why would he want for freedom? He was free _before_ , before Royal Records, before Kids Can Sing?!, before he was anybody. All he ever dreamed of then was what he has now. Freedom is feeling invisible. Freedom is feeling alone. So what if he feels the same now, if he feels it in a claw-footed tub of lavender-scented bubbles, if he feels it over a supper of seared Ahi tuna rubbed with black garlic and a bottle of aged champagne, if he feels it on thousand-count silk sheets on a mattress made overseas by a man who primarily contracts with royalty.

Why would he want anything but this. Why would anyone. His tower, his contract. His money. His constant, loyal, and honest companions. The hermetically sealed packages of single-use luxury clothes and expertly prepared, nutritionally perfect meals. Every photograph orchestrated and _consented to_. Everyone honest, because when you see things clearly, cynically, without romantic fancy, there is no reason to lie.

Freedom is just one more thing he used to believe in. The headlines barely bruise; it’s the snapshots that lacerate. Patrick flips past image after image of Pete’s face, his head on Pete’s shoulder, their hands linked together, their cotton-candy grins.

Once upon a time, Patrick doesn’t believe in anythin—

Wait! Stop there! Did you see it, dear reader? Poor Patrick did.

_Cotton candy_.

*

Pete wakes up in a prison cell.

Life’s like that.

Pete’s been in—well—more than his share of cells. This one is different. The differences are subtle, crouched low in his brainstem, in a sort of primitive sensory awareness that is below his explicit, conscious control. Every time he tries to notice them, they slide. He begins to feel he is in a standard cell, perhaps at the police station, perhaps in the private security holding of Royal Records. Then he catches just the edge of it again, some core _wrongness_ —the angle of the light, the degree of moisture in the air, how sound conducts when he shuffles his feet. Something is off. He just can’t quite—

Actually. Why is it so warm in here?

Pete has never in his life been in a holding cell that was a comfortable temperature. They’re always cold, cold so that you tire yourself out pacing for warmth, cold for that extra metallic discomfort, cold so you don’t relax, cold so that your brain goes sluggish and you’re quick to comply with worse terms in exchange for small comforts, cold so you and your kind don’t smell as strongly, cold so that you’re almost grateful to the people who interrogate you because they’ve brought you somewhere warm.

Once he’s noticed how warm it is—hot, almost, like the temperature inside his skin is in equilibrium with the temperature outside of it—it’s easier to pin down the other things that are wrong. Once he’s noticed them, brought them to the level of his brain that he’s at least moderately in control of, it’s easier to see them.

For example, it’s _pink_ in here. The air, the light, the surfaces—everything. His eyes adjust for it automatically, canceling out the tint so his vision processes normally, like wearing sunglasses. But it’s definitely, undeniably, surreally, _pink_.

And he’s pretty sure—yes—it’s not white noise or ambient sounds filling the air. There’s a _rushing_ , like holding a sea shell up to your ear. Like the sound of circulating blood. It’s coming from the walls, from _inside_ them. And—is the chamber—is it almost— _pulsing_?

That when Pete realizes he isn’t in a cell at all.

He’s inside something _living_.

*

Patrick still has bubbles clinging to his skin when he confronts Drea. He’s wearing only his towel. If he were any less excited, he would be embarrassed by this. As it is, he finds her on the living room couch, monitoring the security camera feeds on his enormous TV with a Cubs game playing on the cell phone balanced on her knee. He puts himself between her at the big screen and, in a fit of anger, knocks the cell phone off her knee. He brandishes the tablet in her face.

Drea, always placid except for the lightning-quick, terrible moments in which she executes sudden, judicious violence, is unmoved by his aggressive display. She blinks at the tablet screen, then up at Patrick.

“Need something?” she asks. She sounds bored. It makes Patrick even angrier.

“ _Look at this_ ,” Patrick snarls. There are still tear tracks down his puffy face, he was weeping over love lost so recently. They probably thought he’d tire himself out. They probably thought he’d go back to being compliant, a dog with a shock collar that never even needs to be turned on. They _thought_.

Drea takes the tablet and calmly surveys the image there. It’s a luridly bright shot of Patrick and Pete with their hands overlapping on a paper cone that supports a large, sticky cloud of cotton candy. Pete’s lunging towards it, face scrunched comically by his bared teeth and flung-open mouth, like it’s a giant turkey leg he’s about to gnaw on. Patrick’s laughing so hard his face is pink as the cotton candy, with tears of an entirely different sort beading in his eyes.

“Sucks what he did to you,” Drea says impassively, shrugging one great shoulder and trying to hand the tablet back.

“ _No._ Look, I said,” Patrick insists.

Because it’s a close shot, taken from directly in front of them. There’s no way a pap got close enough to take it, straight-on, without Patrick noticing. And that’s the thing. Patrick _did_ notice when this picture was taken. He _asked_ for it.

“ _You_ took this,” he says. He knows it’s true.

But Drea shakes her head, looking perfectly calm, perfectly confused. She lies right to his face. “It was a paparazzo. With those telescoping lenses and photo-editing, they can—”

“Did they photoshop my fucking _memories_?” Patrick demands. He’s shouting now. Because it’s hitting him, piece by piece, what’s really happening here. Who the liars really are. Who Pete really is. “I’m not _stupid_ , Drea! Just admit you took the picture!”

“If I took it, how would the press have gotten it?” Drea stands, her hands out in a pacifying gesture. She’s practically twice his size. Patrick knows how easily she could subdue him. Patrick’s seen her subdue people often enough.

As soon as she says it, Patrick knows. “You gave it to them,” he says. He’s too shocked by his own revelation of the ugly truth to remember to yell. “You—you gave _all of these_ to them. There was no secret photographer tailing us. Pete didn’t sell me out. _You_ did. It was _you_.”

“You’re being fucking ridiculous,” Drea tells him.

Patrick darts down, shorter than her and closer to the ground, and grabs her cell phone from where he knocked it. His fingers fly, thumbing open her Camera Roll before she can stop him. A second later, Drea seizes the phone from his hand and removes it from his sight, but it’s too late. They’ve both seen. Every fucking picture he’s seen across news sites and social media and Google images, every piece of that magical day turned trite and hideous by the eyes of millions—they were all taken with Drea’s cell phone.

They were all taken by Drea.

His own bodyguard is the one who sold him out.

They stand there, Drea huge and musclebound and furious, Patrick small and wet and just as angry. “You’re fired,” Patrick says. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

“You can’t fire me,” Drea says.

Patrick rolls his eyes. Of all times to get bogged down in fucking chain of command disputes. “ _Fine_ ,” he says sarcastically. “I’ll get someone who can. ANDY!” He turns and marches over to the intercom system, calls his handler’s name throughout the penthouse. “ANDY! Drea is a fucking traitor. Come to the den and fire her, please.”

He turns back to Drea triumphantly, his arms crossed over his chest like his victory is definitive. But for some reason he can’t understand, she’s smiling. Grinning, even. It’s the most expressive he’s ever seen her.

Just seconds after Patrick called, Andy speaks from the doorway behind him. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Patrick,” Andy says. “Drea was only following orders.”

*

“Joe? Joe. JOE. I could really fucking use some help!”

Once upon a time, Pete doesn’t know what the fucking point is of having a personal genie if he abandons you after wish one.

Once upon a time, it’s probably Pete’s own fault for letting the lighter go down the laundry chute and fall into the evil hands of Patrick’s management anyway.

He tries everything he can think of to summon the shedim—whistling, chanting, shouting. Eventually he just starts jumping up and down, stomping his feet, kicking the walls. He’ll feel bad if whatever organic material the cell is made of can feel his abuse. But he’s useless without an audience. A grifter by himself is just a hungry kid without a home. Right now he doesn’t have a lot of options. Maybe if he makes enough noise _someone_ will venture into this pulsing hell-place and talk to him. Alone, Pete’s useless. In a room with someone, he can do anything.

Pete has always been pretty good at getting his way.

So he pounds the walls and shouts til his throat goes hoarse, hoping the living cell will produce someone for him to charm or swindle or seduce or strike a bargain with. He’s just about exhausted himself when, looking greatly irritated and with three tiny drops of blood at the corner of his mouth, the scary sunglasses guy appears.

He doesn’t walk down the hall, doesn’t peer in from the other side of the bars. One minute Pete’s alone and the next minute this guy is just—standing next to him. There is clearly more magic secreted away in Los Angeles than Pete ever dared dream.

The executive has ditched his suit jacket. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing bare and muscly arms with dark wrist cuff tattoos. His sunglasses are still flawless, but his forehead looks a little sweaty. A few strands of his gelled hair have been knocked askew. He sounds slightly out of breath as he says, “ _Do you fucking mind_?”

“I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Pete says pleasantly. He stops kicking and jumping at once. He offers his hand, hoping the guy will shake it so he can close some of the physical distance between them. The first thing you want to do with a potential mark is fluster them by upsetting their concept of personal space. They’ll ignore later red flags if you trip the whole alert system over something meaningless.

“You can call me Mr. Hurley,” he says, not making any move to accept Pete’s handshake. “But I don’t think you’ll have much need to call me anything, soon.”

That is sufficiently ominous that it gives Pete pause, even in his blustering patter. Is this holding cell going to, like, _digest_ him? Oh god. Will there even be a body? Will it even leave _bones_?

“You have something of mine, Mr. Hurley,” Pete says. The second thing you do with a potential mark is make them _more_ aware of their assets—or at least certain assets. If you’re going to steal the watch off someone’s wrist, you want to squeeze it so hard it leaves an imprint, makes them imagine the weight of it even after the watch is long gone. If you want their wallet, bump their handbag so they clutch the front of it, leaving the back unguarded so you can slip the goods right out.

Hurley reaches into the front side pocket of his expensive slacks and grins, twirling the lighter between his fingers. “Oh, you mean this?” he asks serenely. “Joe is my friend, now, careless one.” He drops the lighter back into his pocket, pats its little silhouette tauntingly. Showing Pete exactly which pocket he needs to pick.

If you want what’s in a mark’s pockets, you need a crowd.

So Pete needs to goad this guy into calling in reinforcements. He needs more people in this cell. He needs noise, he needs jostling, he needs the abrupt, tight chaos of a riot. He needs to a reason to get _close_.

*

Patrick really wishes he was wearing more than a towel. He stands defenseless, all the magic mirrors seized by Drea. Andy walks towards him with friendly, open hands, a completely reasonable look on his face. Patrick is suddenly visited by his temporary madness, by the terrible urge to _bolt_.

His tower and his guardians don’t feel very safe anymore.

Maybe it was a mistake to believe them, too.

“We knew Pete was no good for you, Patrick,” Andy’s saying kindly. “We knew he wasn’t who he claimed to be. But it was clear you liked him. We thought we could let you have your romantic, rebellious little adventure, get some dirt on your public image, and remove the deceitful, unsavory element from your life in one fell swoop. We were trying to be _considerate_ of your feelings, ironically.”

Patrick yearns to believe him. He feels it like a physical ache, the desire for his world to feel trustworthy and predictable, the longing to take for granted that those closest to him are working in his best interests.

He remembers how he felt, sparkling and strung with fire, when Pete kissed him. He remembers how he didn’t care what anyone else thought, what anyone on Twitter might say, what the comments under photos of him and Pete would claim. He remembers just _being_ with Pete, feeling something real, and how that was enough.

He remembers Pete asking, _Do you trust me?_

And it wasn’t just dogmatic belief that Patrick felt. It wasn’t just acceptance by rote of whatever was presented to him. It was something that stirred, real and living, deep within the core of him. It was something struggling to rise in answer of what he felt coming from Pete. It was—faith. It was the blind, unquestioning _certainty_ that what he felt, Pete felt too. That they were in this together from now on, whoever they’d been before.

Patrick believes some things, maybe, and is highly skeptical of others. It’s a start.

“We’re sorry,” Andy’s saying. He’s smiling sympathetically now. There’s a look on his face like he’s going to try and hug Patrick next.

“Where is Pete now?” Patrick demands loudly. Andy registers surprise. It’s not in the script, you see. It’s not what Patrick is meant to say. Before the day he escaped from his apartment and ran away with Pete, Patrick had never gone off script. His handler still doesn’t know quite how to respond when he does.

They’re still expecting him to be gullible and compliant, Patrick realizes. His brain itches. Maybe he can use it.

“He’s in the label’s custody,” Drea rumbles. She exudes disapproval over the question. “Mr. Hurley will ensure he’s dealt with.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong,” Patrick says slowly, figuring it out as he goes. “Did he? If it was _you_ who took the pictures. If you framed him. _You’re_ the deceitful element in my life.”

“He lied about who he _was_ ,” Andy points out. He sounds frustrated. “He made you think he was someone famous, someone who mattered. He toyed with your affections for his own gain.”

Patrick’s shaking his head. “He said he was famous. I said I wasn’t. We both kept secrets about who we were. But what did he do for his own gain? _He_ didn’t sell me out. _He_ didn’t try to use my fame for anything. He just—took me on a carousel, and held my hand, and showed me all his special places. He just tried to find a way into my life. I think… the only thing he was really gaining with that nefarious plot… was my company. Was _me_.”

For just a flash, Andy’s face is raw with spite and anger. Patrick isn’t cooperating. He doesn’t like it.

Patrick laughs, feeling confident and reckless and impossible. “I’m going to go down to the security office and find him,” he tells Andy. “I’m going to make sure he’s released. And then I think I’ll buy him dinner as an apology. We’ll eat wherever we want, and appear in the photographs of anyone who cares to take them. Because _I don’t think there’s anything you can do to stop me_.”

Ah, how arrogantly the young tempt fate! You know what happens next, don’t you? Surely you can guess.

Andy shows his teeth. He says, “Actually. That’s one thing we are very, very well equipped to do.”

And Andy snaps his fingers.

*

Once upon a time, Pete’s locked inside a living prison cell with a guy who won’t _shut up_.

“You’re talented, you know,” Hurley’s going on. “In your own way. Pretty, even, for a human. I think we could sell it. The little illusion Joe cooked up for you was pretty good for misdirection magic, but I can give you the real thing. Would you like to sit down with my lawyer? There’s a nice way out of this cell for good boys who sign on dotted lines.”

“Is that what you offered Patrick?” Pete asks. His voice is hot with real anger. He saw the rainbow-sheen of enchantment pulsing in that contract. Patrick is spelled up tight by this—by whatever Hurley is. Pete needs to be clever and he needs to be quick, if he’s going to set anybody free.

Hurley still wears that alien grin. “Patrick is one of my model clients. He can spin anything into gold, and makes the prettiest noises while he works. But you and I together could do so much more. He doesn’t have your… charisma. You will give me wealth and music til my coffers overflow, and in exchange, I will give you immortal greatness.”

“So Patrick is an example of some of your best work?” Pete sniffs. “In that case, I’m really not impressed.”

It’s barely perceptible, but for a shred of a second, Hurley falters. The rushing sound coming from the walls seems to get louder, the pink tint of the cell redder. It’s like being inside a heart that’s speeding up.

“Pardon?” Hurley bites out. “For a moment I thought you said—”

Pete shrugs elaborately. “I see better tricks than this on the subway platform. I don’t know what kind of all-powerful being you’re purporting to be, but if Patrick’s situation is your idea of money and power and impressive magic, I think I’m better off seeking my own representation.”

Yes, whatever this cell is made of, it’s _definitely_ speeding up. Hurley’s skin flushes. “You want to be dazzled?” he growls. “You want to see a _magic trick_? Oh, I can impress you, Mr. Wentz. _I can show you wonders so profound that you’ll never be the same._ ”

Pete studies his fingernails as languidly as possible. “I doubt it,” he says.

Hurley snaps his fingers, and the lawyer is standing beside him in the room. Pete studies the nails on his other hand. Hurley lets out a small growl of obvious frustration and snaps again. Now the grey-haired older woman appears beside the others.

“I’m sorry, is this it? This is what I’m supposed to be impressed by?” Pete says.

Hurley keeps snapping. Bodies keep appearing. The faces Pete saw in the meeting today rapidly begin to populate the room. Then faces he’s never seen before. All of their aspects follow similar lines as Hurley’s face. Most of them have a visible tattoo. They’re mostly brown-haired, brown-eyed.

“Do you understand yet?” the bodies chorus in perfect, creepifying unison. “This is me. This is all _me_.” They press closer around Pete, flexing their eerie physicality.

“Are you trying to _intimidate me_ into respecting you?” he asks boredly.

Sudden all of the bodies are angry. He keeps his eye on Hurley Prime while the bodies churn and press and jostle around him in their agitation. The more bodies there are, the less good Hurley’s fine control of each.

“I HAVE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO THAN EARN YOUR FAITH,” the Hurleys yell. Spit flies from their furious lips. Their eyes are wild, their fists and corded muscles bulging. Pete is knocked closer to Hurley Prime. He bumps against him, straightens up. Rolling his eyes, keeping his face as expressive as possible, Pete creates a mask of scorn. At his waist, one of his hands pinches the silky pocket lining of Hurley’s dress pants and feeds the fabric bit by bit into the palm of his hand. The lighter hitches up, up, up, sliding without disturbance along the silk, creeping closer and closer to his hand.

“IS YOUR LIFE SO EASY? DOES IT GIVE YOU PLEASURE? WOULD I NOT OFFER YOU BETTER THAN THE LIFE YOU LIVE NOW? THIS IS MY COMPASSION,” they’re bellowing. The more puzzled he is by human quirks, the louder Hurley yells, apparently. Some of the Hurleys are not totally focused on Pete, he notices—some of them have their heads cocked, as if listening to a conversation happening somewhere else. Pete realizes that every duplicate Hurley makes requires him to spread his attention thinner and thinner, split his control into smaller and clumsier bits. Pete may not know what Hurley is, but he knows he’s not infallible. That means he’s going to start making mistakes. He’s going to start missing things.

Pete just so happens to be a professional at operating in those furtive, distracted spaces where people miss things.

Almost—yes. Yes. Gold slips free, landing cool in Pete’s hand. Pete palms the lighter away quickly, lets the crowd jostle him away from Hurley Prime again.

“No,” he says. “Because this is _mine_.”

The Hurleys go still, all staring at him incredulously. “Then you’ve made your choice,” they say ominously. “We will find another use for you. It will be less pleasant than fame and fortune would have been.”

As one, they disappear from the cell.

Pete is alone, crouched inside something else’s slowing heartbeat.

Pete’s hand goes to the pocket of Patrick’s sweatpants. He squeezes tight the lighter there.

Not quite alone, then.

*

“You rang?” Mr. Hurley asks. One moment he it was just Drea, Andy, and Patrick-in-a-towel; the next, the person who scares Patrick most in the world is there. He looks a little sweaty, a little mussed. He’s breathing hard. He’s lost his suit jacket somewhere. Patrick is very briefly distracted by the definition of Mr. Hurley’s forearms, then goes right back to being overwhelmed and righteous in his revolutionary fury.

Andy smiles sycophantically at Mr. Hurley. “Patrick is having a hard time comprehending the reality of his situation,” he says. “We thought you could help us explain it to him.”

Once upon a time, Patrick has absolutely fucking had it. What, he’s afraid of some asshole who wears sunglasses inside? “I’m breaching my contract,” he announces. His voice does not even tremble. Well, it doesn’t tremble a lot. “If this is the way you run your label, I’m better off on my own. You can have your 9 million and whatever else. This deal is off. I’d pack a bag, but none of this was ever mine, so I’ll just—go. One of you, take me to where Pete is being held, and after that, I guess I’ll see you in court.”

He’s quite proud of this speech. Quite sure, for the first time, that this is who he is and what he wants to do, and no one else’s opinion matters. But Mr. Hurley’s eyebrows behind his Ray-Bans inch skyward. “We’re sorry, Patrick. It’s a beautiful sentiment, your resignation, but—we simply can’t let you do that. It would be very bad for both of us.”

Patrick’s mouth opens, but his throat goes hollow. He tries to protest, but no sound comes out. His hands find his own neck. It is empty, empty. He is silent.

Mr. Hurley holds out his hand, and suddenly Patrick’s contract is in it. Patrick doesn’t know _where_ people are keeping this thing. Mr. Hurley folds the contract back casually, reads aloud, “‘Under such circumstances that the asset should demonstrate compromised judgment, as determined by personal companions and staff, Royal Records may assume all formal decision-making capacity until such time that the asset’s mental status can be restored. The label shall assume responsibility for all costs associated with efforts to restore capacity and ensure stabilization shall be made, including medical, psychiatric, and pharmaceutical interventions.’”

Mr. Hurley smiles with teeth. Patrick does not scream.

When Mr. Hurley speaks again, it is in Patrick’s voice. “Oh, this is much easier,” he says.

Patrick is panic. He is surrounded by people he cannot trust. He cannot use his own voice, and Mr. Hurley can. There is nowhere he can run. His voice was always his only power. He does not know how to fight. He does not know how to flee. He can only freeze.

Mr. Hurley isn’t freezing. Mr. Hurley is _advancing_. Mr. Hurley is saying in Patrick’s voice, “Let us explain some things to you.” Calmly, Mr. Hurley is unbuttoning his shirt. Each button undone reveals more of a large tattoo on his chest, a glowing, pulsing ouroboros. As he shrugs out of the shirt, more ink starts to appear on his skin—the distinctive mark Patrick has seen Drea rub so many times on her own bicep bleeding onto Mr. Hurley’s. The tattoos from the back of Andy’s hands appear in the same place on Mr. Hurley’s own. The throat-wrapping tendrils of ink one of the security staff wears on his neck cord their way around Mr. Hurley’s in just the same place. All the time, he is drawing nearer, growing impossibly, terribly _larger_. By the time he reaches Patrick, his skin is crammed, covered, crowded, crawling with tattoos. He is three times the size of a man.

Then he takes off his sunglasses and Patrick sees what his eyes really look like for the first time. _All_ of his eyes. They boil across his terrible face like pustules, like warts. They are in every color, close and choked as the eyes of a spider. Some have pupils, slitted like snake’s or round like human’s. Some do not. Each of them seems to stare deeply, horribly, into Patrick’s very soul.

Patrick is so terrified. He would beg, if he could beg. Mr. Hurley reaches for him and he flinches from the touch.

Mr. Hurley frowns. “Be still, Patrick. This will not hurt. You are so small—surely you do not feel pain.”

Then his hands fall to Patrick’s shoulders. Once upon a time, there is agony, and a brand named Patrick is utterly eclipsed.

*

Pete flicks the lighter, sparking once, twice, three times, before the flame complains with Joe’s voice. Pete never thought he’d be so grateful to hear the sound. “You again?” the shedim grouses. The flame elongates, takes the shape of a man, steps down out of the air. By the time his blue-flame silhouette touches the cell floor, he wears the aspect of flesh.

With short, slicked-back hair, a clean-shaven face, a denim vest, and tight black jeans, Joe looks very different. He looks less like a Hebrew myth than ever. He looks kind of like a mechanic. Only his teeth give him away: behind his expression of irritation, they glitter gold.

Pete is so grateful to see him that he throws his arms around the shedim, lets out a sob against his chest. Joe is very still. Eventually, Pete feels a snaking coldness making circles on his back. He’s pretty sure this is Joe attempting human comfort.

“I have not been hugged in,” Joe says, then falls silent, calculating. After a long beat he finishes, “I have not been hugged before.”

Pete laughs, a little, though nothing about this bad fucking trip is funny. “Can you tell me where I am? What is this place? You made it, didn’t you?”

Joe blinks at him. “You know already,” he says.

“I’m inside him?” Pete whispers.

The shedim nods.

Pete wants to pull up all his limbs at once, to touch no part of this throbbing, sickly cell. He’s inside Hurley, in a prison of his own self, whatever he really is. Pete steels himself against the creeping horror curling his toes inside his shoes and says, as bravely as anyone could, really, in this situation, “I want to make my second wish.”

Joe makes finger guns at him, saying, “Shoot.” The gesture is so situationally inappropriate that Pete takes heart.

“I wish Patrick’s contract was destroyed,” he wishes confidently.

Joe cocks his head just so, interested. He has a great curiosity for human life, our shedim does. “Can’t do it,” he says. “It’s in someone else’s possession. The Talmud is particular about _stealing_. Flexible about _finding_ , though,” he suggests.

Pete nods, takes a breath, and wishes again. “I wish the definitive, binding, enchanted clusterfuck of Patrick’s contract just happened to be in this cell with me.”

Joe sticks his hand _into the wall_ , and Pete doesn’t want to think about what part of Hurley’s supernatural anatomy any of this corresponds to—he has the sinking suspicion it’s probably some sort of rectum—and pulls out the contract.

He lays it carefully at Pete’s feet. He sounds even more resigned than usual as he asks, “And is your next wish to destroy it?”

Pete bites his lip. He promised his third wish to Joe, a lifetime ago, before he ever really believed in wishes. Before he ever imagined he’d need any like this. Pete’s never been especially scrupled, never minded going back on his word. He’s an opportunist, remember. But he has some opinions about freedom, too. About forced servitude. Can he really use a wish to set one person free and at the same time, damn another? Not that Joe’s a _person_ , exactly. He’s said some things that honestly give Pete pause, things like, _I’m either an angel or a demon. Neither of those are that great about human lives, are they? Historically? So why stress about it._ Unbound, masterless, Joe could be terrible. Joe could be as bad as Hurley.

Joe could make up his own mind about what to be.

“How does one destroy a magical contract?” Pete muses. He flicks the wheel on Joe’s lighter experimentally, studies the deep blue flame that springs free. “I have a pretty good feeling about magical flame.”

And Pete bends down and sets the edge of the contract alight.

*

Once upon a time, Patrick is electrified with searing pain. There is nothing in the universe but the feeling of each atom, every molecule, of his form _splitting_ , being _wrenched apart_ , something quicker and more terrible than any knife being _forced inside_. He knows, with whatever part of him that remains _him_ enough to be capable of knowing, that he is being—assimilated. That before long, he will be Mr. Hurley too. That this is what it means, when Royal Records _assumes all formal decision-making_ on an asset’s behalf. Mr. Hurley will wear his face, use his voice to speak, sell his voice packaged neatly in MP3s, build his tower taller with the money he can make, selling Patrick. And no one will notice a damn thing different, because the way Patrick’s life has been these last two years has only been a perfect execution of Mr. Hurley’s will. From the outside—maybe even from the inside—everything will be the same.

The other thing Patrick knows is that he’s powerless to stop any of this.

He was overwhelmed when he thought the villain he was facing was just _contract law_. He has no idea what to do now that he has, apparently, somehow _sold his soul_ to a force so ancient and greedy that it can’t even properly be characterized as evil.

Patrick is at the bottom of an ocean, someplace dark and crushing, someplace airless that squeezes so tight not even his heart can beat. Patrick is _slipping_ , and it doesn’t feel unpleasant, it feels like relief from all the pain. This is how he will die, he thinks: gratefully.

Then, in the last moment before Patrick flickers out, he is blinded by a sunburst of flame. It sears his skin, stinging so sharp that it shakes him away from the poppy-handed numbness he’s been sliding towards. In the aftermath of this sudden wash of heat, he feels—nothing. The pain has stopped.

Patrick opens his eyes. Mr. Hurley is huge above him, too big to be real, too big to fit in this penthouse unless the laws of physics have changed considerably while he was gone. Mr. Hurley’s hands are enormous on his shoulders, but they no longer conduct agony. Patrick wiggles his fingers, his toes. He blinks his eyes. As far as he can tell, he’s still himself.

“No,” Mr. Hurley snarls. Patrick flinches from his voice, made tremendous by anger. Patrick feels very justified in being so frightened of the man all this time. “No! You’re _mine_ , you _signed_.”

Mr. Hurley reaches into thin air and pulls back a handful of curling cinders. He lets out a terrible, inhuman sound. He lets go of Patrick so abruptly that Patrick stumbles. It’s not until Patrick hears himself saying, “What’s happening?” that he realizes he can speak, that his voice is once again his own.

Mr. Hurley doesn’t answer. He turns his back on Patrick, revealing a vast expanse of tattooed muscle that glows and twists in the shape of a living Noh-mask, its eyes searing unholy. Its mouth opens slowly in his skin, stretching the sinews of Mr. Hurley’s back til they go translucent, creating a kind of sheer opening in his living flesh wide enough for Patrick to glimpse a human eye, a mouth, a slash of black hair, a grabbing hand. There’s something _inside_ Mr. Hurley, Patrick realizes. There’s some _one_. The mouth stretches grotesque, the skin thinning and thinning til Patrick can see straight through Mr. Hurley’s hide. There is so much more than bones and magic inside.

“What have you done, street rat?” booms the monstrous label executive. The whole penthouse seems to shake with the thunder of his voice. There is no mistaking who he’s talking to.

From within the terrible depths of Mr. Hurley, Pete’s dear voice replies. “Destroyed his contract,” he says. The imprint of a human hand rises on Mr. Hurley’s back; Patrick knows Pete is pressing on him from the inside, reaching for Patrick. Patrick is too horrified to press back. Pete’s voice is merry, evoking a laugh. “He’s not yours anymore.”

“And how do you think you can possess him, when I have you?” Mr. Hurley hisses.

“I never wanted to _possess_ him, you evil fuck,” Pete says. “I don’t want him to belong to you _or_ to me. I want him to be—his own.” Pete’s voice rings clear and true. Through the monstrous web of flesh, Patrick can almost, almost make out the expression in his eyes. Patrick is horrified, wants to run away. Patrick is entranced, wants to run closer.

No one has ever saved him before.

No one has ever wanted anything _but_ to possess him.

Mr. Hurley quakes with rage. His voice is terrible as he spits, “For _this_ you have stolen from me! For the freedom of one small mortal, you have robbed me of wealth and songs unimaginable. My cave of wonders grows dull with dusty treasure, ages-old. I want _new_ things. I have learned the songs of old and I have _bored_ of them. Now you have ripped this mortal’s gifts from my hoard! Never in all the ages of time have I heard a voice lovelier, and it was _mine_ until you stole it! Why should I let you go, thief? Why should I ever let you go?”

“I have one last wish to make,” Pete says. Goosebumps rise on Patrick’s body. He holds his breath, waiting for Pete to burst impossibly from the prison of skin he’s caught in. Mr. Hurley tenses, hissing low in his throat, his muscles rippling with strain, as if he can keep Pete caught by flexing.

But Pete doesn’t wish for himself. From inside the belly of a beast, Pete says, “Joe? I wish you were free.”

With the most terrible sound Patrick has ever heard, Mr. Hurley begins to laugh.

*

Pete’s pretty sure he’s fucked it all up.

The lighter grows so hot in his hand that he drops it by reflex. On the floor of his prison cell, the metal _melts_ , passing through liquid gold before it begins to sizzle into smoke, so hot it evaporates. The smell is wretched. Pete tries not to breathe.

All around him, the walls are throbbing with Hurley’s cruel, amused laughter. Hurley’s voice fills the cell, taunting. “You got your hands on a real wish and you used it to free a _shedim_? You call _me_ evil, and then you free a _shedim_? On _purpose_? Oh, you really are a delight. Perhaps I will keep you alive after all, if you persist in being so entertaining.”

The smoke from the dissipated lighter is growing thicker. It tangles around Pete’s ankles. It buzzes in a familiar way where it touches his flesh. It feels like when Joe healed him, so horribly knitting his split skin.

“I kept my word,” Pete says. “You can kill me or keep me. The important thing is that I kept my word.” He’s saying it out loud because he thinks this might help him believe it. Because when has honor ever mattered to thieves? Sick and low in his gut, he is aware he has done a murderously stupid thing. _Survival,_ Pete’s supposed to care about _survival_. Hurley’s skin is thickening, his last look at Patrick quickly and terribly obscured. That’s it, he figures. The last thing real thing he’ll ever see.

Life’s like that.

Then something begins to echo in Hurley’s laugh, a wracked and muddy sound, like something fleshy being hacked apart. It is brutal. It is methodical. It takes a while for Pete to realize it’s the sound of a second person laughing.

Well—not a person exactly.

Because the foul-smelling smoke keeps getting larger, uncoiling acrid and with the pulpy hue of rubies. And it is laughing, swirling with great blueish tongues of thicker-than-smoke. Before Pete’s eyes, it takes on the corded fibrous shape of muscle, the shining slick of plasma, becomes _smoke_ and _body_ at once. The sound like laughing come from a shape like a mouth, a darkness that spills with tongues, a tear in the universe that flashes with gold.

“Joe?” Pete asks. He can taste the fear on his own tongue. The fetid pink of the world around them is starting to blacken, like skin held up to a flame til it blisters, pops, and turns to dust. Hurley’s laughter is beginning to sound more like a snarling howl.

That wet, chunky laugh grows louder and louder. Pete is made over with dread. “ _You dare invoke my name?_ ” The voice is a hiss the buzzes up from the marrow of Pete’s very bones.

Pete swallows very hard. He closes his eyes, thinks of Patrick, thinks of this one, very small good he’s done in his life, stacks it up against the evil. Keeping his word to Joe no longer seems much like balancing the scales.

“Just because you’re free,” Pete says, bravely as he’s able, “doesn’t mean people won’t have expectations of you.”

“ _Is that so_ ,” says the hissing voice. It almost sounds amused.

The sound Hurley is making rises like a teakettle reaching its boil. The walls and floor, the ceiling and bars—all begin to shudder, to jolt, to shrivel and shriek. Pete already knows he’s going to die in here. Pete already knows life’s like that.

“OUT, DEMON!” Hurley yells. It is loud enough to make Pete’s head feel like it’s splitting apart. He’s fallen to his knees. He wraps his arms over his ears, trying to block out the sound.

“ _First you dare to possess me, then you tell me where to go? I am not one of your trinkets, Panoptes! You overgrown fucking salamander. You hoarding perversion of Bes. You will not command me. I will put out your eyes one by one!”_

As its voice grows, the smoke of the shedim only gets bigger, its inhuman form more solid. The air only gets harder to breathe. The smoke coils around Pete tighter and tighter, constricting his limbs, choking out his breath. He is glad his eyes are closed. He tells himself he wasn’t afraid to live and he’s not afraid to die.

Then there is a great tearing, and Pete is thrown through the air.

He’ll be surprised as anyone if his eyes ever open again.

*

Once upon a time, the caged bird doesn’t care if his hero’s armor or horse are white. He only cares that he’s been saved. He only care he lives in a world with heroes.

Once upon a time, Patrick rocks the limp body of Pete in his lap, watching in awestruck horror as an angry smoke-creature thrashes in terrible, scrabbling battle with the enormous beast with whom Patrick once signed a record contract. If he’s not mistaken, he thinks the smoke might be _singing_. Specifically, he thinks he hears it hissing, “ _I’m a genie in a bottle, baby, you gotta rub me the right way_ ” as it pummels Mr. Hurley’s many eyes and splitting flesh with furious, disincarnate fists.

Once upon a time, shit is too weird to be believed.

Pete, though. Pete here and solid in his arms. Pete, his face desperate, saying, _do you trust me? When we met I told the truth._ Patrick is too scared, too lonely, too grateful, too alive, and too free to care about what Pete said—which part was honest, which part was lies. Patrick cares about what Pete _did_.

Pete wouldn’t have released Patrick from his fame, if all he wanted was to capitalize on it. Pete wouldn’t have saved that demon if he was only interested in his own gain.

Patrick kisses Pete on the mouth, over and again.

And Pete’s eyes open.

*

Once upon a time, a shedim wrestles a creature older than folklore and ten times as greedy. Once upon a time, the shedim wins.

Once upon a time, a boy named Pete and a boy named Patrick hold hands as they race down flight after flight of stairs, running with terror and adrenaline and each other, just like when they met. They reach doors frosted with the Royal Records logo and don’t even slow down. Patrick throws open his gilded cage and together, they burst free. On the street, under all that sky and unowned air, they kiss each other like they’re the only people on a carousel, the only people in the world.

Once upon a time, they kiss, and their lips murmur with the uncertainty of not knowing how vanquished evil really is, and their tongues slip with the possibilities of what the shedim will turn out to be and what that might mean for them, those who tangled their fate up with things much older, stranger, and more dangerous than their mortal lives were made to hold. But mostly they just kiss, finding comfort and curiosity and a brand new magic in the heat and closeness of each other, and are satisfied that for now, they are together.

Once upon a time, they live happily ever after, and figure out the rest as they go.

Once—maybe just this once—life’s like that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be back with chapter 2 of 3 next week!


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